I have a very serious problem that needs resolving. I conducted a very important interview using Audacity, closed my mac without saving it, when i went to open my laptop it wouldn’t take me to the login page so had to restart.
opened Audacity after the restart and it said there was an unsaved file so i clicked on it but now all of the audio is gone and the attached photo is what remains.
how can I recover my unsaved project the way it was before the restart?
Since the normal forum response pattern is much shorter than this, I’m guessing you should start thinking about what would happen if you didn’t have a show.
Koz
You should have saved as a project or exported if it was important. 
Computers should wake up properly, but they might not.
What does Help > Show Log… say in the Audacity menu bar, and what is the location of the Audacity temporary folder as stated at Audacity > Preferences…, Directories section?
Unfortunately if the temporary folder is inside /var/folders, the audio data would be removed by the Mac when it rebooted. 
We have a bug open to move the default temp location to somewhere that survives reboot.
Time Machine backup won’t help you, even if it woke the computer to backup, because it doesn’t backup in /var/folders.
Gale