It took me 30 min to record an audio (then I immediately saved one version), and another 30 min to edit.
While I was trying to save again, I was told there wasn’t enough space, so I had to spend another 30 min to clear my old files, only to find that Audacity was forcing me to save the project in cloud (which, by that time, I had never used). I tried several time to save in the original way, but the message kept popping out.
So I had no choice but to trust the cloud, but then I was told the sync failed and my project could not be found (???) I logged onto the cloud for the very first time, saw the project there but it was empty. No use opening it.
My original local file was corrupted as well. Whenever I opened it, the error message just popped out. Eventually, I thought maybe I could duplicate the file to somewhere else and tried again. It worked, but all the edits I made were gone.
Seriously, what was that? I googled this issue, and seems like many people have come across this problem before, but there isn’t an actual solution. Thank God at least the recording was still here, but Audacity almost gave me a heart attack. I don’t think I’m gonna trust and use this software anymore
You can back-up to the cloud but it’s recommended that you work “live” on an internal hard drive (or SSD). And it has to be an NTFS or ExFAT drive. FAT32 drives don’t work “live” with the AUP3 database format.
Yes.. Audacity projects (including the automatically created temporary files) can take a LOT of disk space. They use a high-quality floating-point format and they save “undo” information which means it may have multiple-different variations of the same or similar audio data.
I always recommend saving WAV or FLAC files immediately after recording whether you make an Audacity project or not. The project file is a database format that’s more “fragile” than regular audio formats.
If it’s critical, make multiple back-ups as you would with any important data.
If you’re recording something important where’s there’s no chance of “take two”, make a back-up recording in parallel with another computer or a solid state recorder, etc. Computers are the least reliable things we own and usually you don’t even know there was a problem until the next day…
If you do a lot of recording or if you have a home studio, etc., it’s helpful to have a dedicated audio computer that doesn’t get otherwise messed-with. Some people keep their computers offline or otherwise disable automatic updates so that nothing gets changed in the middle of a project.
If I were dealing with a situation like that I would try opening a second copy of Audacity, cut the data from the first copy, and paste it into the second copy. Then save the project file in the second copy to a local hard drive.