I have a tendency to close out of audacity without saving because sometimes I’m just tinkering with an audio file and I don’t need to save it. So, I racked up quite the recovery feed and usually when I would use the program I would just ignore the pop up for it. Recently though I had a song that I recorded to tape then accidentally recorded over it, but before recording over it I dubbed it to audacity and exported it as an mp3, but didn’t save the project file and I figured it was somewhere in the recovery feed. So I clicked the recover button and it recovered everything all at once and it opened so many windows that my ram most have maxed out and audacity crashed. Now the recovery window does not show when I launch the program and I’m left wondering where the hell those files went.
Even if they are deleted I bet I could still find them them with a hard disk recovery tool but I have never used a program like that and I don’t know what directory they were stored under.
Recovery tools work a lot better in the brochure than they do in real life. When a drive deletes a file, it just forgets the title and where it put the work. If you have a fresh, clean drive you may be able to get the raw data back and if you really led a blameless life, put it all back together again.
However. If you’ve been using your drive for a while, you no longer have files. You have fragments. My analogy is a public library who didn’t have room to store a new book, so they ripped it to pieces and stored the pieces wherever there was room…and then carefully wrote down what they did.
If you “delete the book” they burn the list. Have a good time reconstructing the book—or even finding all the fragments.
Microsoft tries to use up all free space before they start actually stepping on old work. Macs, and I think Linux, immediately start destroying old work. They have no recovery.