I’m running the latest versions of Audacity and OS X. I lost the files for an hour long recording and am trying to manually recover after auto-recover didn’t work. I found all the tools needed, and am about to rename the files in sequence based off of time stamp as the online manual says. I have one problem though that I can’t seem to find answered in the manual, what if my files are in different folders? In my recovery project files, all the .au files are randomly distributed into 13 different files (d00-d0c). Should I combine them into one file before arranging my files by timestamp? Or arrange by timestamp within the 13 files, then recover them separately?
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You have 13 different folders called d00 to d0c.
As it says on Audacity Manual, it is best not to recover more than about 1000 AU files at a time. Each folder contains a maximum of 256 AU files, so that means it’s best to recover from no more than four folders at a time.
You might be able to manage two recoveries from four folders, and the final recovery from five folders, as the last folder probably won’t be full.
Gale
I presume that you found the relevant page in the manual? http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/recovering_crashes_manually.html
Personally I never bother with manual crash recovery - if the automatic crash recovery fails then the chances of full recovery manually are fairly poor, so I just write it off and start again (fortunately a very rare occurrence, and usually a result of me doing something really stupid 
)
If the project has been edited, then it may be impossible to put all the bits of audio into the right order, because the date stamps relate to when the audio block was modified and no relation to where it belongs in the project.
Assuming that you are dealing with an unedited recording, Audacity creates a folder and writes block files to it, then after writing about 256 data blocks Audacity creates a new folder and writes into that one. If there are only 13 data folders, I’d suggest working on them one at a time. If you are able to successfully recover data from all of the folders, you will then have 13 sections of audio to sort end to end.