Hi Sherry; Sorry you had to re-enter your tasks
You have a lot of custom fields so you must have created a custom form to create new tasks.What you might want to do is to create a separate task directory for these forms. The default set-up of Outlooks has one tasks directory, aptly named "Tasks". The Outlook "To-Do List" is a composite view of all of these task directories. This is a powerful feature but causes confusion because it's not generally known. As you state that these tasks are "pretty critical", I'd put them in their own directory with a specific view configured.
Conversely, I have a directory called "Administrative Tasks" that I do not want to waste my time thinking about until it's time to do them. For example my re-occurring task of "pay bills" comes up the last Friday of every month - today. When I check this task off as "complete" it will disappear from my view (but not be deleted).
Another directory I have is (sales) "Prospecting". These are prospective clients in my sales cycle. I do not have to contact any of them... but if I don't do sales, my revenue will dry up. For this reason, I do not want to see tasks in my prospecting directory in my "To-Do List" view.
My point is different kinds of tasks require different ways of organization and creating different Tasks folders is a way to accomplish this.