empty data files

[Tali]

I have been using audacity to record students' exam coursework.
I had 3 folders, each containing 8 subfolders (one for each student)
In each sub folder was between 2 and 12 separate audacity recordings - a data file, and a link with the little headphone icon for each recording.

One day, approximately half the little icons disappeared, and the data file that remained was empty.

Some subfolders were completely empty (just empty data files with a title)
Some were fine, all recordings still there.
Some had varying amounts missing - some fine, some empty.
One file was corrupted, so It looked ok but kept generating a 'cannot be read' message so I recorded the audio as quickly as possible onto another medium.

I realise the missing data will never be retrieved, but I'm a bit ... keen... to know what happened so I don't get caught like this again.
Is it a virus? Something in a process? hardware? Something I downloaded by accident?

...?

[bgravato]

Which Audacity version and which Windows version?

[Tali]

I work between 3 computers - downloaded audacity at home 3 or maybe 4 years ago, at school last year. So it would have been whatever was current at the time. The files did not go missing during a transfer from one pc to another. windows is xp.

Is this a problem you have heard of?

[Tali]

I did look at the version of audacity I have - I can't see anything that identifies it as 1.3 or whatever. If you can tell me how to look for the version name, I'm happy to try.

[steve]

For the Audacity version number: "Help menu > About Audacity"

I had 3 folders, each containing 8 subfolders (one for each student)

Where were these folders? Were they on the (local) C: drive or on a network drive?
If they were on a network drive then possibly the most likely answer is that a network problem caused data loss.

[bgravato]

The files did not go missing during a transfer from one pc to another.

It always worries us everytime someone talks about transfering audacity projects from one computer to another... That can be a source of problems if it doesn't look like it at first...

Audacity projects are made of two parts: an *.aup file and a *_data folder (where * stands for the name of the project). Both parts are needed. The data folder contains thousands of tiny .au files which contain the audio of the project. The aup file is just a text file (xml format) that contains all the info about the project and all the files in the data folder.

Copying between different version of audacity can get you into trouble too... Specially if you're using the 1.2.x series in one of the computers.

Audacity 1.3.x can open projects saved in 1.2.x, but not the other way...