Help: I lost a whole day of recordings

I was working on a 2 hour long project. Spent all day on this.

When i try to open my project, it says that I have 1086 orphan files and only the main track appears, I don’t have all the other tracks. Please don’t tell me that I lost everything!! Is there a way to recover this?

View screenshots here:
https://imgur.com/a/Wbtfi

Are you working from an External USB Drive or a Cloud Drive?

Koz

From external usb drive, yes.

We have been noticing odd behavior that may be connected with drives that are not internal to the computer. We’re still investigating.

Do you have WAV files of all your original material so you don’t have to shoot anything again? The edit may be toast, but it’s usually not too deadly if you still have all the raw work that went into it.

Koz

It was all recorded in the project file and it crashed when I tried to export the whole project to mp3. So no, I don’t have any wav files. I just have those 1500 small five seconds files that seem to be the data from the project.

They should be six seconds. Yes, those are the snippets Audacity uses to reconstruct your show.

You seem to be missing some pieces of this.

This is a normal Project.

You didn’t mention a _DATA folder in your posting. Where did you find all the little AU files? The AUP file and the _DATA folder have to be in the same location and have the name you gave them in Audacity. No fair changing names later.

A crashing edited project is impossible to recover because all the AU files are scrambled according to your edit.


It is recommended you export WAV copies of all your original work—your raw recordings before you do anything to them. You can use copies of those to create your mixed show with no danger of killing everything if Audacity goes down. It’s not recommended to shoot your show and then edit directly on top of that work.

It’s also not recommended to edit directly to an external USB drive. There have been a number of problems with people doing that. Edit on your internal drive and transfer the work to an external drive later for storage. If there isn’t room on your internal drive, you may have found the reason for your crash.

Koz