I haven’t been able to find a definitive answer as to whether Audacity 3.75 on Windows 11 has an autosave feature. Lots of various discussions and tips about autosave/recovery on other releases, but nothing seems relevant to the latest releases. I lost a lot of work due to not saving my project before leaving the room, when Windows decided it would be a good time to reboot itself. I see discussions about temp files and autosave files, and auto-recovery after “crashes” (is Windows restarting a “crash”?), but Audacity isn’t offering to recover upon restart and I can find nothing to recover my lost edits. Thanks!
While you are working on an Audacity project, all changes you do are written to a file which can be saved while you are working and/or after you have finished your work. This file (.aup3 in “modern” versions of Audacity) is not a sound file. You need to export your work as a sound file. The .aup3 file can be deleted after your work is complete.
This said, when Audacity crashes it tries to keep most of your work and next time you open Audacity show you a dialog asking whether you want to recover a not properly saved work. So far I have never experienced a crash with unsaved work - so I can’t tell you whether a small or a big amount of your work can be recovered. But what I have read so far, it does ask you.
When you try to shut down (or restart) Windows, the operating system should ask you whether you want to save your work of any running program. At least, macOS and in Linux do this…
I can’t tell you what happens if the operating system itself quits unexpectedly.
A good advice, in my opinion, would be to issue a “save” command every now and then.
Indeedy - and the shortcut Ctrl + S does this nicely ( Cmd + S on Mac)
Peter.
Agree, I should save more often. I don’t think Audacity has that save and recover you and others have mentioned. It least it didn’t ask me to recover my unsaved project after Windows rebooted. I’ve seen the term “after a crash” used. I’m wondering if “crash” means an Audacity crash that it caught and did some quick saving magic on the way down, but this feature doesn’t cover the scenario when Windows rips the rug out from under Audacity. I was hoping someone with Audacity internals experience might be able to clarify. It would be REALLY helpful if Audacity just did periodic autosaves like to many other packages in the world. Based on some older help files, it looks like it used to, since it was supposedly a configuration option on the preferences->directories page at one time.
As part of the of old Audacity Team I did most of the crash recover testing on the old 2.x series and then again when we released the 3.x series with the changed, single integrated file, database structure.
Recovery always worked fine for me in various crash scenarios.
I never tested with an interruption with a windows update as I always have my PCs set up to avoid updates during my working/waking hours. I always have automatic updates set for an overnight time window.
The tests I did, I believe, simulated “rips the rug out from under Audacity”
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I used the Windows Task Manager to End Process Tree this is much more more drastic than simply using End Task which affords a more graceful degradation and exit.
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turned my PC off mid-project - also pretty drastic.
So I am surprised that for you Recovery fails to work in a Windows upgrade situation, but I do seem to recall an earlier post on here (or maybe on Muse’s Github issues log) about the same thing.
Peter.
I’m happy to see that Audacity has autosave and it works! I killed Audacity through task manager a few seconds after an edit, and when it came back up got the recovery dialog. Tried killing it a few ways, restarting it a few ways, and every time Audacity’s recovery works as it should. I’m still confused about what happened when Windows rebooted while I stepped away. Maybe I’ll try that again some time, but for now I think I’ve dialed back the Windows automatic reboots, and I’ll save, save, save. Thanks for the help.
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well I finally got a chance to test Audacity’s Recovery on a machine where an active open but unsaved project failed to be recovered when rebooting after a Windows update.
My W11 laptop in Zurich had not been updated in six months or so, so gave me the ideal opportunity to test this - but just the one shot of course.
I will log this as a bug on Muse’s GitHub issues log.
Cheers,
Peter.
Thanks for the report 
Peter.