How to avoid the danger of "File -> Save" when "Save As" is needed?

There are situations where I opened up a photo or graphics file, and made 81 modifications to it (crop, adjust color, brightness, contrast, etc, etc), and when I am ok with that file, I use

File -> Save As

to save the file as a new file. But since File -> Save and Save As are so close to each other, there are times that I chose

File -> Save

instead. And my original file is gone. For this

1) Is there a way to bring back the original file easily?
2) I can immediately "Save As" new_pic.jpg and then undo all those 81 steps and then "Save As" again using the original file name.

But are there better ways to handle it when it happens? I think a better way is to first make a copy of that file, and then edit the copy, but usually I don't know I truly want to keep the new file and use Save As, so usually I won't make a copy first.

When you know from the start that you are going to save your file under a new name afterwards, then do "save as..." immediately because then it's taken care of already. When you later save, it'll be in the copy as you intended.

A simple solution might be to make the original photo read only. If you do this as part of the routine you use when you upload from your camera it shouldn't be too onerous.

Then when you come to save you should at least get a warning that the file is read only which will remind you to use save as.

Unfortunately there's no simple way to bring back the original once it's been overwritten on the hard drive. Your approach of undoing your edits and resaving is the one I'd use too!

If you use Linux there is copyfs that does automatic versioning and wayback-fs which claims to be able to add this to any other filesystem, though unfortunately both of these currently appear to be unmaintained.