Audacity Forum

I jsut finished recording a 17+ hour audio book, and, in organizing the files for editing, I renamed them in the finder. Consequently, when I opened the newly renamed files (I had renamed the data folders accordingly), I got a message that the data could not be found and did I want to replace the missing areas with silence, or quit and make no changes. Of course, I quite with no changes, but it seems things were lost. Now I'm quite confused, and am afraid to do anything else. The stupidest thing of all is that I hadn't yet backed this project up - my external HD had crashed weeks ago, and I hadn't replaced it yet. THERE's a lesson painfully re-learned!

Can any one help? The loss of that much data, not that we haven't all experienced something like it- is just sickening. I'm hoping I can recover at least part of it.

Thanks -

Donald

what exactly did you rename?
what else did you do ?
did you move anything ? files or folders ?
did you delete anything with windoze ?

can you un-rename what you changed?

have you read the tutorial on recovery ?

OK, so you renamed both the .aup files and the _data folders, right? And you named them the same, right? If the answer to both questions is "Yes", you should be able to get your projects back.

First, remember that the .aup file and its associated _data folder must be in the same directory (folder).

Second, back up everything now to a separate folder, just in case.

1) Open each .aup file in TextEdit.
2) Look for a line near the top of the file that looks like this: Where it says "projname=", that is the name of the _data folder that this .aup file is "attached" to. In this case "MyProject_data".
[The above assumes you are using Audacity 1.2.5/6, since that is the forum you posted to. The format of this line is different in 1.3.x, but the "projname=" bit is still in there.]
3) Close the file without saving changes.
4) Rename both the .aup file (the one you just opened and closed) and the _data folder to correspond to what you found after "projname=". Make sure that the .aup file and the _data folder are in the same directory.
In this example, you would rename them to "MyProject.aup" and "MyProject_data".
5) Double click the newly-renamed .aup file. It should open properly and find all its audio data.

Continue doing this for each .aup file and _data folder pair.

Good luck.

-- Bill

The other obvious solution is un-rename everything back to the original names. You can find the original names by opening up the AUP file as above and read them.

Koz