I'm not sure what you mean here. I can think of two possible timeouts that you could be talking about.

Do you mean that the login timed out, and you needed to enter your password again?

In this situation, if you enter your password and log in then the changes you made should be saved.

Currently if there is longer than an hour between page loads then the system asks you to refresh your password - though once you do that then changes should save OK. So if you want to ensure you don't get asked to refresh the password then save your progress at least once an hour.

A little trick here if you've been over an hour and you're worried that asking for the password might make you lose work, just open another browser tab to an admin page of your site, use that to refresh your login, then go back and save the work in the other tab.

The reason for the one hour timeout is so that when you leave the site you don't remain logged in for too long, allowing someone else to use your computer to edit your site.

In practice this is probably not an important security feature these days (I mean, if someone has access to your PC they can just reset your password anyway!). So I could increase this to, say, two hours if it would make life easier for everyone?

Or, was it some sort of server problem that caused a timeout and a "Guru Meditation" type error?

In this case it probably means the server is under some high load and you can retry. To do this, wait a moment then reload the page, and the browser will say something like "Do you want to resubmit the data" and you say yes, then this should save the changes.

Hope this helps!

Joe