Hello:
i hope someone can help me…I had an audio file worth 5 hrs of recorded material…
I was trying to save and audacity froze…I read through all the manuals and it said it would recover it at initiation.
it kept freezing every time I tried to recover it. I had to force quit my computer and restart.
Then clicked recover and it “showed recovered” but the file was empty!!
Is there any way I can recover all of that data?
Kindest regards,
Halyn
it kept freezing every time I tried to recover it.
It might do that if your computer fills up.
Desktop > Go > Computer > Control-Click on the hard drive (mine is Macintosh HD) > Get INFO.
Attached.
Available: is important. It should be bigger than about 10GB to 20GB. This is assuming you’re using the built-in drive on your Mac. If you regularly record 5 hours, you’re going to go through drive space in a hurry.
Koz
Can you give your version of Audacity (all three numbers) and version of OS X? See the pink panel at the top of the page.
Whatever data there still is would be in your Audacity temporary folder. Look at Audacity > Preferences… then “Directories” to see where the temp folder is.
If it was a raw recording you had not edited yet, and the data is intact, you might be able to recover it manually.
Gale
you might be able to recover it manually.
Assuming there’s room. Audacity can take several times the size of the show in storage while it’s working. If you don’t have enough room to rescue the show plus housekeeping, you’re just going to go 'round and 'round like you did before.
Koz
Thank you all for your kind replies and helping me figure out what happened. AS you suspected I don’t have enough storage! 
I will try to clear out some space and then try the other recommendations and see if it is still possible to recover. Thank you!
As a factual point, to have saved your five hours as a stereo Audacity project (AUP) you’d have needed by default a minimum of 6 GB, and in practice a bit more to allow for moving all the data around.
If you were exporting a 16-bit WAV or an MP3, you need less.
All this means is that you had say 10 GB when the problem happened, you probably had enough space. It would have been painfully slow to save but there was some other problem.
But you don’t have enough space to edit with at 10 GB or even 20 GB. Each edit of that complete recording takes another 6 GB. So run for example Bass and Treble and Normalize on it, and you’ve used 18 GB.
Gale