Temp file recovery

[turtlemack]

So I was working on my recordings last night, and my computer was being slow, so I decided to restart it. I thought I had clicked "save as" and saved all my .aup files in a place I could find it, but have since realized they were probably in the temp folders instead. I can't find these files after I restarted. Do these files get wiped clean on reboot? How can I find them? I've tried all the document recovery stuff on the wiki help, but none of it really helps, and I'm not that good with computers and so I'm not really eager to try something drastic by myself without guidance. Please please please help me find these files.

[kozikowski]

If you gracefully restarted your machine, Audacity would have removed all the temporary files on exit. The tools to recover abandoned files are called Crash Recovery because they work after a machine or Audacity has crashed.

You cannot recover intentionally erased files from a Mac. When they say "You cannot undo this action," they're not kidding. We had two instances where insanely valuable files were accidentally erased from a Mac. The entire Systems Division of the company -- including former Apple employees using "inside tools" -- couldn't restore them.

Koz

[turtlemack]

Great. I did gracefully restart my machine. I just....really thought that I didn't save them in the temp directory. That is really stupid that it does that.
Thanks.

[kozikowski]

Wait.....what?

Let's take this again. While Audacity is working, it saves strangely formatted work in the temporary directory. When you get to where you want to save some permanent version of the work, either Save A Project and Audacity will create the famous AUP file and _data folder, or Export and Audacity will provide a stand-alone sound file suitable for posting on-line or emailing to your mum. The Saves and Exports should all go to the desktop, music folder, or other commonly available location.

What did you do?

The temporary directory is listed in Audacity > Preferences > Directories > Temp Files Location. That folder can be a little rough to get to with the desktop tools.

Koz

[skookum1]

I've found the tmp directory, but while I know the lost audio must be at least 1/2 hour long I just see a lot of 1mb files, not a 50-200 mb length one as should be expected; they were all created last night around the time what I was doing was being recorded. Do I just import them one by one and "tag them on" to the end of the previous one, in sequence? Or am I missing something in how to do this? Is there a tool that auto-seeks and auto-combines them? Apparently not, but am I right in thinking that each of them (all 163 or so) are chunks of the missing audio (it was me playing guitar in my room, including lyrics that were spun off the cuff, so I'd like to get at them....hopefully my Mac doesn't crash and force a reboot in the meantime.....).

BTW how it happened was that Audacity just sponstaneously crashed for no apparent reason, during recording).

Oh, (new edit) I think I'm fine on the recovery now; I wasn't able to locate/unfind the hidden directory but Audacity's import function found them for me....so now it's a bunch of cut-and-paste to assemble the file....now I just hope it doesn't have the same glitchiness that the OTHER file I'm having issues with does (some kind of click/pulse thrhoughout the track, even though I hadn't had click track set on and there was no click set "on" and there was no indication during recording of the resulting sound of the audio; I can email the resulting track if anyone might want to hear it, bu I'll make a separate thread about this....though not sure how to describe it.....

[steve]

I just see a lot of 1mb files, not a 50-200 mb length one as should be expected;

That is normal. Audacity writes data in 1 MB chunks. The advantage of doing this is that if you make an edit in the middle of a track, Audacity does not need to rewrite the entire track data, it only needs to change the relevant blocks.

See here for more information about how Audacity handles files (it can save a lot of headaches and tears to read this) http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/File_Management_Tips

Is there a tool that auto-seeks and auto-combines them?

There's some information about crash recovery here http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/CrashRecovery
(I've not used these tools myself)