It’s been awhile now since I’ve had a crash so I don’t remember exactly what the dialog pop-up looks like, but when it does pop up it says something like there’s being an older project file on the hard drive, and it asks if I want to open that or not.
So that’s what I do; then I can often see the last autosaved project as one of the tabs above the Overview bar, if not the only Project tab.
It might perhaps be a bit of trial and error what the different buttons in the pop-up will lead to, although I think they’re quite self explanatory. Don’t be shy to try out the different choices when starting SL after a crash, nothing bad could happen.
I find though that SL is more stable now and the crashes happen very seldomly to me, as compared to like in June.