Saved file seems to have lost all data

Audacity Emergency! Anyone have any magic? I had a 55 minute episode recorded. It was saved. I had done Noise Control. Saved. DeEssed. Saved. While in the middle of DeClicking, Audacity crashed. Now there’s nothing in the file. I googled it, but don’t see much hope there. Using Audacity 2.2.1
Computer is: MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015); 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5; 8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3; Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB; OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 (15G17023))

I suspect the problem is this: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/important-bug-fix/48358/1
so I would recommend that you update to Audacity 2.2.2 as soon as possible.

DeEssed. Saved.

Every time you Save (Project), Audacity steps on the original project with the corrections. During production, it’s good to Save As a different project name, so it stops making changes to the original show.

Even further, it’s good to Export the work as a perfect quality WAV (Microsoft) sound file, certainly after you get done recording and before you start editing. You need to conform to WAV standards: mono or stereo only and no file over three hours.

It’s good to know that Audacity Projects do not save UNDO. So if you don’t have some unique form of the original production, you only have edit interim versions. If Audacity goes belly up in the middle of production, that may be the end of the show.

Koz

Click the graphic if it doesn’t fit top to bottom.
ProjectFileExample.png
Koz

That’s Full Obsessive Mode.

Export a WAV file of the original recording. Duplicate that somewhere else if it’s not recoverable. Thumb drive?

Save a Project during and at the end of the first day’s edit.

Save a different Project during and at the end of the second day’s edit.

Save a different project during and at the end of the third day’s edit which happens to be the final day.

Export a WAV of that Project. Duplicate somewhere else in case of failure.

But wait, there’s more.

I’m using ISO dates instead of slash marks and I’m only using cross-platform standard characters: Upper, Lower, Numbers, -Dash- and Underscore.

And finally, no spaces in filenames.

Koz

Thank you everyone. I’m updating to the newest Audacity program and I will start new habits that will protect against this in the future. I had not been exporting until after I’d done all my edits, so I was relying on my original file. When I first started using Audacity a couple months ago, I’d been doing “Save As” and new file names, but it’d been eating up my hard drive space and this was the first one I hadn’t taken that precaution on. Pretty reckless, now that I think about it. Today is a new day, so I’ll re-record and make the new recording better than the old one :slight_smile:

To be clear, this is what happened in 2.2.1 and was fixed in 2.2.2

  • make a new project, Save Project As and name it (for example) MyProject
  • do some editing
  • Save Project As (instead of Save), with name MyProject (that is, using Save Project As to over-write the project)
  • do some editing
  • Save Project As (instead of Save), with name MyProject
    – at this point the project was damaged beyond recovery.

Using Save Project As with different file names for different stages of the project was, and always has been, safe.

– Bill

What happens now in 2.2.2?

Koz

In 2.2.2, a Save Project As with the same project name is the same as Save.
– Bill