Hi,
I’ve been editing my audacity project for a week on Audacity 2.4.1 with macOS Catalina 10.15.6.
One day, I just saved the project and closed it as normal, few hours later when I got back, I received the following error message:
(Sorry that it’s in Chinese version, but namely the same as follow:
)
Also, all the sound track seems disappeared.
It’s an hour interview, which is important to me, what else can I do to the file?
Thanks!
19 block files is equivalent to less than 1 minute of stereo audio.
How much audio is missing?
“Orphan blockfiles” are additional blocks of data that are not used in any project.
“all the sound track disappearing” indicates “missing” blockfiles rather than “orphaned” blockfiles.
Did you perhaps move or delete the project’s “_data” folder? Are you aware that Audacity 2.x projects always have a “_data” folder?
If you wish to use Audacity 2.x, upgrade to Audacity 2.4.2 (it has some important bug fixes). Audacity 2.4.2 is available here: Old Audacity versions download
Thanks for the reply.
In my case, there are 152 orphan files (as shown in the 1st image)
and I’ve checked that the “_data” folder is still saved in the same folder as the .aup file.
However, I found that some folders miss the files inside. (see the attachment)
and as you can see from the 1st post (1st image), the soundtrack is flat, there’s no sound at all.
Is it possible to get them back?
(I’ve upgraded to 2.4.2, but the files opened as the same situation)
I doubt it. 
Anyhow, I wonder how does this happens?
In case it happens again, I hope it can be prevented.
So this is part of the motivation for the redesign of the Audacity project in Audacity 3.0.x. WIth the new project structure, ALL of the data is contained within one .aup3 file and it is HOPED that these kinds of problems will not happen in the future. A database manager is used to make sure there are no inconsistencies within the file. I would suggest upgrading to 3.0.x to avoid this issue in the future, HOWEVER with any change like this there are always newly introduced issues and there is NO guarantee that the original problems have been corrected.