Hi,
I started using audacity rather recently for simple audio recording. I don’t edit any of my recorded audio in Audacity.
That being said I had sat down and done a recording the other day for approximately an hour, deemed it was too late to export and saved the file before going to bed. Fast forward a couple days and I am sleep deprived and needed urgently to record my next session before the day was over. In my haze I assumed I had exported the audio on the track, proceeded to delete and record a new track as per my usual routine.
Come to day and I realized I never exported it and am distraught by all the work I have lost.
I looked up my problem to see if there was any way to retrieve my data but haven’t found anything too concrete. After downloading ShadowExplorer I managed to grab the files from the day I didn’t export and now have them tucked here on my desktop. The only issue I’m having now is when I try to open it in Audacity I get an Error saying
Error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 312
Is there any way I can fix this or use the AU format sound files from the data folder to save my previous recording? I have both the original files as well as the data folder I exported with ShadowExplorer. Is there any fix at all for this?
I use Windows 8 and there is no Restore Previous Versions as well as I did not have my File History turned on so neither of those are an option for me. Please help I can’t redo what was done in that recording.
If the AUP file is not repairable and you never edited that recording then in principle the previous version of the _data folder can be used to recover the recording. This depends on the timestamps of the AU files being correct. See http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/recovering_crashes_manually.html.
The Shadow Copy service still exists in Windows 8 but there is no interface for it. So presumably the previous versions of the AUP file and _data folder that Shadow Explorer found come from a restore point that System Restore made.
Thanks so much for a quick response;
Unfortunately the project has been opened and closed a bit so that’s out.
I’ve already tried to view the file in Notepad but admittedly I had no real clue what I was doing and decided against fiddling with anything. I’ve attached the file to this response. UNDERTALE.aup (136 KB)
The AUP file has a large chunk of entries missing which means that it only knows about the start of one channel of a stereo track and the end of another channel of some track. There is no easy way to reconstruct it.
I have a question about using the temp. data files to reconstruct my project;
for some reason whenever I attempt to load up the files I grabbed with Shadow, it will give me an error saying Audacity did not recognize the AU file and suggests I import it raw. When I attempt to import raw, however, all I get is loud static in the playback. So far I only found one intelligible audio snip.
When I went through the current data files and attempted to load as raw I noticed it distorted that audio as well. Dragging and dropping the current AU files onto the track gives me no issues though. It’s just with the previous versions of the files I have trouble. Is there a known reason for this?
They are not temp files, they are (or should be) files in the UNDERTALE_data folder.
There is no benefit in importing the AU files raw - you can only import one file at a time and will get a blip noise at the start which is the file header. If you do import RAW you need to choose 32-bit float encoding in the Import Raw Data dialogue.
I have no experience with Shadow Explorer so I don’t know how reliable it is at preserving files “as is”.
Feel free to attach an AU file that Shadow Explorer found, though we are not guaranteeing that we can “fix” anything.