I had 2 years of audio work on my external hard drive when it crashed in June and then said all my files were corrupted. At the time, I only had my files on that hard drive as my computer had just also crashed and nothing was saved on it either after the repair. Unfortunately I didn’t have the foresight to save to the cloud. Some of these files were around 4 hours long. I was able to retrieve these files but for some odd reason the only way they could be retrieved was by organization of file type and nothing else. So I have all of my AU format sound files grouped together and no way to understand how to organize them back into the files they were. There was a lot of really important stuff on there.
I looked around and I couldn’t find anything that quite matched how to fix this problem, does anyone know how to save this? I currently have audacity 2.4.1 but the files vary in what version they were recorded in- again this is 2 years of stuff.
The hard drive was a my passport and I have transferred the saved files onto 2 seagate external harddrives.
I’m sorry if I’ve missed any info I would really appreciate any insight to this.
There are [u]Data Recovery Applications[/u] and [u]Data Recovery Services[/u]. Some of the applications are free applications and the non-free applications usually have a free trial that will recover a few files and/or they will give you a list of recoverable files.
The services can recover almost any data that hasn’t been over-written or intentionally wiped. If the drive has failed or has been damage (by a flood or lightening, etc.) they can replace a circuit board or remove the discs and put them into a working drive, etc. A reliable company will give you a free estimate after you send them your drive.
The _DATA folders contain all your sound in six second snippets. The AUP file is a listing of how Audacity should arrange the snippets for your production. There is no reliable way to construct the shows without both.
A reliable company will give you a free estimate after you send them your drive.
Which still may not help. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a recovery before, but you don’t get back to where you were. Depending on the damage, you may get back most of the content, but with scrambled filenames. In the case of pictures, spreadsheets, or documents, that may be enough, say, for an office or business rescue. But Audacity needs all those tiny files to be perfect and correct for the shows to open. Chances for success are almost exactly zero.
Thanks for the replies guys! I mean, I’m not entirely hopeful but the problem is that all the files are there, they just aren’t organized as they should be. That’s what’s frustrating, nothing is missing, but everything is unorganized and because of the necessity for it all to be very precisely organized into specific files and files within files I have no clue how to know how to organize it back. I have figured that it is the case as you say, the chance of me getting them organized is probably zero, but there are files on there that mean a lot to me, and I l’m not really an audio expert I was hoping one of the things I didn’t know about audio would be some easy trick to reorganize them back in place haha!
Thank you for your responses!
