Help recovering corrupted project?

[aparadoxinflux]

Hi all, I’m coming to the forum after desperately trying everything I can think of to recover a project that seems to be corrupted and unable to be opened.

The last time I was able to open the project successfully was 12/4, but now whenever I try to open it, I get the dreaded “Audacity failed to read from a file in…” error. I’ve gone through the steps in this link multiple times:

[Recovering corrupted projects | Audacity Support]

But when I do, 1st: a .recovered file doesn’t show up so I then have to do the “audacity-project-tools -recover_db -recover_project broken.aup3” step. The command prompt goes through the whole process, but when it ends, there isn’t just a broken.recovered aup3 file, but also a aup3-wal file, and I am still unable to open and recover the project.

Unfortunately, I suspect this whole thing may have been caused by the fact that I was attempting to work on this project across two computers via OneDrive (I know…this is something I was unaware of until looking up answers to this problem and I’ve learned my lesson. Definitely switching to local storage from now on!).

Is there any possible way folks could think of that I could successfully recover this project? I’d hate to lose the work I already did on it!

Here’s the full report on the error that I get:

{
“timestamp”: 1733529282,
“event_id”: “7934dc7eb281e54cbf1db7a82875f9bd”,
“platform”: “native”,
“release”: “audacity@3.7.0”,
“contexts”: {
“os”: {
“type”: “os”,
“name”: “Windows”,
“version”: “10.0.22631”
}
},
“exception”: {
“values”: [
{
“type”: “File_Error”,
“value”: “Audacity failed to read from a file in .”,
“mechanism”: {
“type”: “runtime_error”,
“handled”: false,
“data”: {
“sqlite3.rc”: “101”,
“sqlite3.context”: “SqliteSampleBlock::Load::step”
}
}
}
]
}
}

[kozikowski]

@aparadoxinflux

The last time I was able to open the project successfully was 12/4,

What’s the project and what were you doing to it on Wednesday? Did you save the project like you always do? On C:? Did it seem to save OK? Did it take about as long as it always does?

What were the last edit steps if you remember?

How long is the show?

How long did you have it open on Wednesday?

How big is the system drive (C:) and how much room do you have?

Does your machine connect to the internet even though you don’t use the connection for production? Like do you have Skype open in the background and napping? Zoom?

While you’re editing, do you have .aup3-wal and .aup3-shm files on your desktop?

Koz

[aparadoxinflux]

Hey Koz, thanks for asking for more info!

The project is a podcast episode with three tracks, about 1 hr 40 min in length. The file was saved on my drive, which is a 3 TB internal HDD that I use for the majority of my file storage on my Windows 10 desktop, since I have a small (254GB) SSD as my :C drive, and is also the drive that OneDrive pulls from. This is also where I’ve always saved my Audacity projects and files.

I may possibly have had the project open for a significant time on Wednesday and it’s possible that it never saved properly, or was saved properly but then Audacity perhaps didn’t close properly afterwards when my computer shut off for the night (I sometimes leave it on for a while to allow OneDrive to sync, but also I have a smartplug that may have just shut the computer off at a certain time of the night)

The last edit steps I remember were likely just some close editing, making cuts to the tracks or adding silences.

I do have my desktop connected to the internet via ethernet, and then when I’m using a laptop, on Wi-Fi. I didn’t have any big processing hogs open other than Audacity, except maybe Google Chrome with one or two tabs.

When editing, I’ve never seen the .aup3-wal and .aup3-shm files show up on my desktop – they always end up in the drive folder that the project is saved in.

I’ve had several instances of those -wal and -shm files staying after closing the project, and I have also been having an issue happen frequently recently where Audacity will crash shortly after attempting to save a project, and then fails when I try to send a crash report. I’m wondering if something’s up with my version (I’m working with 3.6.2). So it’s not a particular surprise that this has happened with this file, since I’ve recently been seeing a lot of opening up audacity and having recovered projects that didn’t save properly.

[aparadoxinflux]

@kozikowski and actually, just to check some things, I just tried opening up another totally separate project (saved on the drive), and after a minute or two, closed the project (using CTRL+W/the File menu’s “Close Project” option, and when audacity closed, it produced a problem report (Exception code 0xc0000005), which is what’s been happening frequently like I mentioned above, and when I try to hit send, I always get a message back saying failed to send crash report. I’d c/p the entire problem report, but it’s too many characters for this post

[aparadoxinflux]

I’ve also taken a screenshot of my CMD prompt for when I try to run the project recovery tools – I always get the Danger!!! Unsupported Audacity version detected! warning line, even if I have the correct version installed. I had 3.6.2 installed, which I uninstalled and downloaded an older version, 3.6.0, which the cmd prompt says is required, but that still didn’t work-- it still tells me I have the wrong version of audacity

[kozikowski]

@aparadoxinflux

I’ve had several instances of those -wal and -shm files staying after closing the project,

As far as I know, Audacity uses the -wal and -shm files to produce the saved Project. If they get left behind, it could mean Audacity didn’t save a clean Project, or didn’t exit cleanly.

–
I’m reasonably sure that Windows doesn’t much like “magic” drives.

Do you see the smiley face as the drive name while you’re editing?

Koz