Disappearing project bodies

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Yet another problem with Audacity 3.7.7 on Windows 11
As usual, at the end of the evening, I save my projects as usual, using “save as …”

This morning, when I went to open them, I had “couldn’t find the project data folder ….”
A closer look revealed that, instead of the projects being well, well over 1GB as they usually are, they are just a mere 188kb and 184kb.

For one of the projects, it has in fact created a “data sub-folder”, but it’s inaccessible and even when I click on the project that I’m supposed to have saved, it still can’t find this data subfolder, even though it’s the program itself that chose where to save it with no prompting from me.
For the other project, there is no further trace of anything.
I imagine that I’ve now lost all of the work on which I’ve been working for the last two weeks, which is annoying to say the least, but how can I put a stop to this for the future and save my projects in the giant mega-files to which I am accustomed and which are accessible to me?

2

Incidentally, I’ve been saving my projects by typing the name and extension (.aup) as I’ve always done.
This evening, I let the program insert its own extension. It came up with (.aup3). That shows a full-size project (1.19GB) and opens correctly. So I dunno

3

This implies you are editing for long periods without saving. If so, you are taking a big risk by not saving regularly.

I’m not sure why you have been doing that and how it’s been working. I’m fairly sure that a separate data folder and aup project file haven’t been a feature since Audacity 3.0 came into being. Some versions of Audacity will open those old projects but won’t save to the old format.

Yes, very annoying. You could try searching to see if there are any files saved with a “.aup.aup3” extension. If you find any you could rename them without the .aup part.

You have answered this yourself in your second post. That’s what to do from now on.

4

Thanks for your help