Two corrupted Files in one day

Audacity 3 Help Forum
1

Okay, so this issue seems eerily timely. I just read another member’s post from a couple hours ago, and it seems almost the same issue. I’ve been using Audacity for over a year with zero issues, and I’m running the most recent version.

Today I lost two files to what appears to be some form of corruption. Over the last few days I kept getting messages saying that there wasn’t sufficient disk space. This was weird, as I have hundreds of gigs of free space. But I’ve since learned that my files were all automatically being saved to OneDrive, and not my machine. Huge mistake on my part. I sorted out the OneDrive issue, and where my files were originally showing with a red x, they are now showing green checkmarks in OneDrive. The problem is that the files will not open in Audacity now. I’m getting the following code:

“Audacity failed to read from a file in C:.”

When I open the information, this is what shows:

{
“timestamp”: 1769031874,
“event_id”: “3876040d5b26134385669e844057c4a7”,
“platform”: “native”,
“release”: “audacity@3.7.7”,
“contexts”: {
“os”: {
“type”: “os”,
“name”: “Windows”,
“version”: “10.0.26100”
}
},
“exception”: {
“values”: [
{
“type”: “File_Error”,
“value”: “Audacity failed to read from a file in .”,
“mechanism”: {
“type”: “runtime_error”,
“handled”: false,
“data”: {
“sqlite3.rc”: “11”,
“sqlite3.context”: “SqliteSampleBlock::Load::step”
}
}
}
]
}
}

What’s weird is that the explanation seems to suggest I’m running Windows 10, but I’m running Windows 11.

I followed the directions to try to repair the corrupted files, but either I’m missing some key step, or there’s another issue. I have gone through the protocol multiple times to the letter, checking my work carefully.

When I get to step 9 (Type audacity-project-tools -drop_autosave broken.aup3 and press Enter.),

What comes up is the following message:

“unable to open database file”

These two projects represent literally hundreds of hours of work, and I’m quite beside myself at this point.

Can anyone offer some clue as to what I’m missing and/or what options I have for recovering them?

Disk Full Error Message
2

Okay, as I got this sorted out, I’ll post here in case anyone runs into this in future.

It seems that because my Audacity files were being saved directly to OneDrive, a sync issue developed when I inadvertently ran out of cloud space. This means basically that OneDrive interrupted Audacity while it was trying to write to the SQLite database. This in turn caused a catastrophic corruption so that the file couldn’t be read, let alone opened. So here is what I did, and what you can try:

Go into your OneDrive account online, then go into your files section, find the file, and right click. It should give you an option to check version history. Open that and you should see however many older versions are there. Click one that you know functioned before the meltdown.

Click ‘Restore’.

Go back into your main OneDrive file and right click the newly restored file. It should have today’s date and the new time stamp on it. It may also be smaller than the corrupted file, but that’s not the point.

Right click ‘download’ and save it somewhere safe. Do NOT attempt to open it directly from OneDrive. Get it on the ground in your machine first.

Then either go into Audacity and open the file (from its safe location), or else go to the folder on your computer where the file is saved and open it from there.

It worked for me and, if this ever happens to you, reader, I hope it works for you.

Cheers, and good luck out there!

1 Like
3

If you want OneDrive out of the picture entirely, this article tells you how: Turn off, disable, or uninstall OneDrive

1 Like
4

Thank you kindly! I have now bypassed it for my project, but this is very helpful to know for other applications. Thanks again!