My 3-Hour Sound File Has Disappeared Completly!

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Audacity Crash on my Win 7 laptop after 3 hours and 59 tracks.
It started up with a recovery file.
I fixed the last track, saved the recovery file then went to save as a new filename for safety.
Audacity Crashed again but this time, the only thing I had in my hard drive was an old .aud back up file from 1 hour ago.
No sign of the recovery file, no sign of any old version I saved (of course I saved through out the 3 hour session).
I searched my system for .aud. When I did this, there were no files found with today’s date.
This feels like a curse, but I am hoping it is pure technology with a solution.
Has anyone ever heard of such a thing?

2

(of course I saved through out the 3 hour session).

How? Did you save as Show1, Show2, Show3, Show4, etc, or did you periodically press Save over the same single show?

Given the three hour production and fifteen minute backups, you should be up to Show11 or Show12 each with a separate AUP file and _DATA folder. Did you lose all of them back to show1?

What did you call the shows – the exact filename? Are you using an external USB drive to get the extra room? What kind of computer do you have and which Windows?

Koz

3

Then you are using a very old, old buggy 1.3 beta version of Audacity which may be the cause of the problem. Please see “Audacity 1.2.x and 1.3.x are obsolete and no longer supported” at the top of this page. You can get the latest 2.0.3 here http://audacityteam.org/download/windows .

If you save the recovered audio, it is saved exactly in that state and the recovery file is discarded. So if there was something wrong with the other tracks, they are saved like that.

If some tracks have the wrong audio it is best to to export the tracks that have correct audio as WAV, open Help > Show Log… and save the log so you have a list of all project errors, then force quit Audacity in WIndows Task Manager. That way, the autosave recovery file and data is not removed and you can look at the log and see if you can repair the errors.

If you save the recovered audio and Audacity then crashes, there are no changes since the last save, so there is still no recovery file.

You should still have the previous project you saved. Can you find that? It may be in File > Recent Files. Note that Audacity projects have AUP extension, not AUD. Make sure you search for “*.AUP” (without quotes).



Gale