This is very important to me. I created a ~15 minute gameplay and then saved it under a file I named “AUDIO3” … so then I was editing it in windows live movie maker, and when making an individual last part, I saved it as AUDIO3 not knowing that the full commentary was saved there. Is there any way I can fix this? Even if it requires a bunch of stuff?
UNDO?
If you saved (exported) the Audacity file as .wav and the Moviemaker file as .mov or whatever Windows uses, then they’re both still there. Those are different files.
Get Windows to search for AUDIO3 and you should get two hits with different icons.
If they were both WAV files, can you make Windows “Step Back” or whatever Windows 7 and 8 call it?
Last in the list is file recovery programs which in Windows works reasonably well because Windows doesn’t immediately overwrite newly “vacated” disk space. Directly overwriting a file is different. You may not get there if Step Back fails.
Koz
If you over-wrote the file, you probably won’t be able to recover it.
There’s a chance that you didn’t overwrite the whole file, and there’s a chance that Windows wrote the new file (with the same name) to a different place on the disk.
If the actual bytes on the disk were overwritten, you can’t recover. It’s a little like recording movie on an old VHS tape… The original video is gone-gone-gone.
There are data recovery applications (some free) and data recovery services, I have on old copy of [u]Ontrack Recovery Software[/u] and it saved me from a serious “crash” several years ago. I’m sure the old version I have doesn’t run on Windows 7 or 8.
There is a trial version of Ontrack, but I’m not sure what the trial-version limitations are…
The same company offers recovery services, but it would have to be REALLY important because you’d have to pay professional hourly rates, for who knows how many hours.
A crash is different from a stable system intentionally overwriting a file.
Data Recovery is usually used to recover the only known transfer documents for your estate on Grand Bahama Island. They take the drive apart in a clean room…
Koz
Just to note that trick whereby a deleted audio file is not deleted but only marked as available for overwriting only works on magnetic drives. If it’s a solid state drive and the TRIM command is turned on as it should be and functions efficiently, the file is gone.
Trim doesn’t work with FAT32 file systems, and a USB SSD would probably use FAT32.
Anyway, we don’t have enough information on what really happened and what version of Windows or what file system is in use.
Gale