i am desperate for someone to help me. i am recording an 5 hour long audiobook for a publisher. they recommended i use audacity, which i did–2.0.5. Unfortunately, I lost my entire saved project. I backed up the file on an external hard drive as well, but it says the project does not exist.
I was in the middle of making edits and the program just shut down. They asked if I wanted to recover the project i was working on–i said yes, but for some reason that particular project called THIFbyChapters was not there. The original file completely disappeared from my computer. I currently have one entailed THIFbyChapters.aup.bak and the data folder with thousands of 6 second clips.
The final edit of this is due by Monday. Is the project salvageable? I am pretty ignorant when it comes to computers so the Audacity Crash Recovery page was a bit overwhelming for me.
Am I able to piece together all the individual .au files in the data folder? If so, can someone please let me know the instructions in more layman’s terms? Is there a recovery tool for Mac OS X users?
What does Spotlight (magnifying glass in the upper right) say when you search for any part of the show name? Can you see other things on the external drive?
How did you make the backup?
Do you use Time Machine for whole system rescue/backups?
The only chance to piece together all those little snippets is if the system crashes during live capture. If it crashes during a complex edit, that service will not work.
We advocate saving the whole show periodically under a different filename, so if everything turns to peanut butter, at least you have the last backup — maybe yesterday — to fall back on.
Do you still have the original, raw capture voice?
You may not have backed up the project correctly. Try opening that AUP file on the hard drive. Tell us the exact error message. Does it say that it cannot find the _data folder? If so, the AUP file must be in the same folder that the _data folder is in. The AUP file must not be inside the _data folder. Also the AUP file and _data folder must have the same name, for example “Sunday_Songs.AUP” and “Sunday_Songs_data”.
Do you mean that project was not listed in the Automatic Crash Recovery dialogue?
If so, open Finder, use Go > Go to Folder and type:
~/Library/Application Support/audacity/AutoSave
The AutoSave folder is where Audacity keeps an “autosave” file that Automatic Crash Recovery tries to recover from.
If you see a THIFbyChapters file there with a TMP extension ( “.tmp” after the file name ) you can try renaming the file so that it has “.autosave” (without the quotes) after the file name. Then next time you launch Audacity it will try to recover that project. Automatic Recovery may recover more recent edits than the backup on the hard drive will.
Is that the backup on the hard drive? As explained above, you can’t go renaming the AUP file and _data folder.
If Audacity created that .aup.bak, you should look in Audacity > About Audacity… and see if you really have version 2.0.5. Audacity 2.0.5 should not create .aup.bak files.