Lost work disaster

Special Interest Groups Recording Techniques
1

An acquaintance of mine was complaining about a blunder that lost him some recording work.

I am not clear on the details, but in my experience (1) if you hit NO to “Do you want to save changes?” then that’s your fault, (2) if you have a crash or power failure, recovery is pretty good in my experience with Windows 7 (3) Even a new project you never saved is recoverable, I verified by killing Audacity with Task Manager then restarting.

Where does recovery information persist? Is it in the same directory as in Edit, Preferences, Directories?

Is there any hope my friend could find data there? Or could something wrong with his setup interfere with auto-save in non evident ways?

2

Until the project has been saved, recorded audio data is stored in the Audacity “Temp” directory: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/directories_preferences.html

After the audio has been saved, recorded audio (including audio recorded after the project was saved) is stored in the project “_data” folder.

More information in the wiki here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Crash_Recovery

3

Someone else pointed me to this. Is it obsolete?

http://www.mesw.de/audacity/recovery/

4

That the “1.2 Audacity Recovery Utility” (recovery utility for Audacity 1.2.x) that is mentioned in this section of the page that I gave the link for: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Crash_Recovery#1.2_Audacity_Recovery_Utility