In the previous version of Audacity a “backup” was saving each track as a WAV lossless file.
This was removed in Audacity 3 I believe, as the current backup simply saves the same .aup file which will be irretrievable if the Audacity has crashed, and I need to use another DAW to complete my project.
Why did you remove this safe backup option? I read in another post your advice to always save the projects as WAV files, but without the instructions how to do it as this function is no longer available. Disappointing.
How can I save my project files in the lossless WAV format?
Because there is no longer a _data folder to put the WAV files in.
In the old “AUP + _data” format, the WAV files replace the .AU files in the “_data” folder. It would be possible for Audacity to replace the audio data in an AUP3 with WAV files, but pointless as you can’t directly access the contents of an AUP3 file.