Hi All,
Please help if you can. I had just finished a podcast with friends. We had stopped about halfway through on track 1 and picked up recording on track 2. Nothing we havent done before.
Afterwards when i went to save i got an ERROR message saying “ERROR: Could not save project. Perhaps (file path) is not writable or disk is full” I saved it to my desktop and i have plenty of space on my hard drive.
I went ahead and save an MP3 since the .aud file didn’t seem to want to save. But i noticed that all the audio recorded on the fist track was blank. I know i definitely had recorded it because i did a playback during our transition to get a feel of where to pick up the topic, and the mic setting haven’t changed. I’ve had enough issues in the past to visually monitor the recording as the show is going on.
Long story short, the entirety of the data on track 1 looks like it was wiped clean. Even part of track 2 looks wiped. Has anyone experienced this? ANY advise on how to get this data back would be greatly appreciated.
Please tell us what version of Audacity you are using (all three numbers, please see the pink panel at the top of the page).
Versions older than the current 2.1.2 are a little prone to specious errors about not being able to save a project, when they can export fine. You can get Audacity 2.1.2 from http://www.audacityteam.org/download/windows.
However in this case it looks like there is a problem with your reading your project data. Please post the log from Help > Show Log… top right of Audacity. Please see here for how to attach files: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-attach-files-to-forum-posts/24026/1
If you need to exit Audacity before you reply, force quit it in Task Manager, so that no data will be changed.
By the way, the Audacity project file is called an .aup file.
Gale
log 8-8-16b.txt (189 KB)
Thanks for the Response Gale,
It looks the the version i’m using is Audacity 2.1.0, so ill make it a point to download the newest version from the website asap.
I’ve attached the Show log after i did a force close and did the the recovery option upon reopening Audacity. The program froze 2 times before being able to open it fully on the 3rd try. That when i was able to open the help menu and save the log. Because i was scared of losing the data permanently with no hope of recover i left the program open on my laptop since Sunday so i could keep everything the same until i could talk to somebody.
I hope this Show Log is helpful. Do you think there is any chance of recovering the data?
Thanks again,
Not good news.
I didn’t say to reopen after the force quit. I was hoping for the log before you force quit, assuming you could get to it.
The log after you reopened shows that Audacity could not open a lot of temporary data files such as “C:\Users\DEESP_~1\AppData\Local\Temp\audacity_temp\project11756\e00\d00\e0000851.au”.
Do you see that weird user name DEESP_~1? When this problem happens in older Audacity, it’s often because the username is long or contains Unicode characters, but not always.
Unfortunately if you try to reopen after the force quit and Audacity cannot open the files, it overwrites the data in those files with silence without asking (as it says it has done at the bottom of the log). It’s bad behaviour, but it means there is no way back unless there are backups of the original AU files. You would need to have Windows File History set up, including backup of the above temp folder.
If you had told me you had force quit and were awaiting instructions, then we could have renamed the AUTOSAVE file to stop Audacity trying to recover the project, and tried to drag in some of those AU files manually, or tried to piece them together with a recovery tool. But if you had been editing the project, rather than it being the raw recording, the show would have had the segments in the wrong order, so it may have been hopeless already.
The problem could be something else, if you’re saying that part of the project is intact and functional. It could be that your drive has issues such as bad sectors so that some files won’t read or write but some will. You could do a S.M.A.R.T. test on your drive to see if it is in good order.
If the S.M.A.R.T. test is clean, right-click the C:\ drive in Explorer, choose “Properties”, “Tools” tab and run the error checker.
Gale
That is disappointing…but thanks anyway.
I guess it cant be helped. I did try to get the show log file before closing but it was totally blank. I tried to attach it but it wouldn’t upload because its a blank text file i guess.
Im going to try to do a recover i saw on youtube. If it doesnt work then thats it.
Thanks again for trying to help.
I don’t understand it being totally blank, but it suggests more might have been happening than just an Audacity problem.
Be careful if you are asked to download some tool. Miracle solutions on YouTube are often malware designed to harm your computer. If you are looking for file recovery software, you can try for example Pandora or Recuva®. To maximise chances that you will find old copies of the files, install the recovery software on, and recover to, an external drive.
And, do those S.M.A.R.T. tests and drive checking, and update to Audacity 2.1.2.
Gale