In addition to preserving the log to figure out what happened to the village, I would like to add that in that same folder is a backup copy of your village. If you are playing in the first slot of the game, your save game will be called Isola21.ldw and your backup file will be called Isola221.ldw.

If some tragedy befell your village, you may be able to salvage the situation by preserving the original and backup copy of the save files to the desktop and then copy over the save file with the backup save file in the save file folder. (ie get rid of Isola21.ldw and replace it with Isola221.ldw but rename the Isola221.ldw to Isola21.ldw).

So just make copies?

The entire procedure is covered in this post.