database connections disappearing

The site has a repeater connected to a dataset. I haven’t made any edits in a few days and it was working fine last time i looked at it. Today the customer informed me that the repeater isn’t working. I open the editor to find that it was not connected to the dataset. Why did it disconnect and how can I prevent this in the future. It is imperative that these things stay the way we left them. I can afford to keep going back to reconnect datasets or event handlers.