Urgent help needed recovering an important unsaved Audacity recording after crash
Hello Audacity community,
I urgently need help recovering an important audio recording that was lost after Audacity crashed.
I was using Audacity 3.0 on Windows 10. We were recording audio directly into Audacity through a Focusrite audio interface, while Focusrite Control was also running.
The recording was never manually saved as an Audacity project before the crash.
What happened
After recording for some time, we stopped the recording, but unfortunately did not save the Audacity project. Audacity then crashed.
When we reopened Audacity, the Automatic Crash Recovery window appeared and showed a list of projects/files that could be recovered.
We selected the files for recovery, and the recording actually opened successfully and showed the waveform. This is important because we could see the recovered recording at that point.
However, we did not save the recovered project. We closed Audacity because we wanted to reopen it and identify the correct recording based on its date/time.
When we opened Audacity again, the Automatic Crash Recovery window no longer appeared and the recording was no longer visible.
What we have tried
We checked Audacity’s temporary SessionData directory:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Audacity\SessionData
Most of the files remaining there were very small files measured in KB.
We also checked the Recycle Bin, but there was nothing relevant there.
We then used Recuva to perform a deep scan of the SessionData folder.
Recuva found three Audacity files named approximately:
New Project...
Two were marked Unrecoverable.
One was marked Poor, and we were able to recover it to an external SSD.
The recovered file is:
New Project 2026-08-10 20-51-34-1.aup3unsaved-wal
It is approximately 2.62 MB.
Recuva reported that it was partially recovered.
My questions
Is there any way to reconstruct the original recording from this recovered .aup3unsaved-wal file?
Could there be a corresponding:
.aup3unsaved
.aup3unsaved-shm
file that we should search for or recover separately?
Is there another Audacity recovery procedure or tool that could potentially reconstruct the recording from the WAL file and any remaining temporary data?
Most importantly, the recording appeared with a complete waveform when Audacity initially performed the automatic recovery after the crash, so I’m hoping the actual audio data may still exist somewhere even though the recovery prompt disappeared after we closed Audacity.
The laptop uses an SSD, so I have stopped doing unnecessary work on the laptop to avoid overwriting potentially recoverable data.
I have also kept the recovered 2.62 MB .aup3unsaved-wal file on a separate external SSD.
This recording is very important to us, so any advice on how to safely investigate or reconstruct the project would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you very much for your help.
IMO if the (recovered) project was closed without saving it, then it’s gone. 
@Trebor, unfortunately, you are correct. When a project is opened after a crash audacity opens its unsaved version. If you close the project without saving, audacity discards the unsaved portion.