Crash - No Temporary Files

[asabove01]

Using: Audacity 1.25
Machine: Mac Intel, 2.8 ghz, 2 Gb ram

Hi,

I made a recording last night and left audacity running overnight. I woke up this morning and that machine was crashed - the screensaver was frozen and my keyboard and mouse did not work. I followed the crash recovery wiki, used Tinkertool to show hidden directories, went to the tmp/ directory that was shown in my audacity preferences...and there are no temporary files. I go to tmp and see:

audacity1.2-username

I go into that folder and see:

audacity-lock-username

And that's it -- no hundreds of temp files from which to recover. Perhaps I should also mention that when I started audacity after rebooting it never asked whether or not I wanted to delete the temp files, it just started normally. I did not save the project, nor is there a copy of the project anywhere.

So what do I do? The audio that was recorded was irreplaceable. I read somewhere that perhaps the operating system wipes the temp folder on reboot?

[kozikowski]

If you run out the capacity of the System Drive, the machine goes into Alice and Wonderland mode. Entirely surreal and completely lacking in logic.

OS-X is a UNIX-based operating system. UNIX does not "know" what a hard drive is. Everything is an extension of internal memory and mounted file systems. Filling up the hard drive (as someone else on the forum recently did) has the effect of sliding an ice pick into the machine's brain.

This is different from when Audacity crashes. In that case, there is a rational part of the computer (the kernel) still running to manage things. When the kernel goes down, so does everything that was happening at that instant.

I wouldn't be surprised that the work may still exist but is invisible because the file system is so badly damaged at that point. Do you know how to get into Single User Mode? I think there are tools you might be able to use to search for damaged files, although it's not like Windows where you can "undelete" something.

Do you have a modern enough Mac to have Time Machine®? You might see if reverting to an earlier time helps.

You never said how you got the machine back operating again. You went straight from a smoking, dead machine to the recovery tools you were using. That's like the Hollywood conceit of watching the man and woman head for the bedroom and cut to them having coffee and donuts at the breakfast table the morning after. There were significant events in the middle.

Koz

[asabove01]

Dear Koz,

Thanks for the response. Actually, there were no significant events in the middle. I rebooted and my computer is working just fine as far as I can tell. Nothing weird has happened since. Perhaps I was lucky in my unluckiness.

I got ahold of Data Rescue II and it's not showing the files as deleted/recoverable. Perhaps some safeguard prevented damage. I would hope so, it's horrible to think that the Audacity development team and the OS X team both would have absolutely no safeguards to prevent your machine from being fried just because you forgot to hit pause or stop on an audio recording program.

I would try the single user login, but I think I can live without the files -- I'd rather not risk opening up the possibility of the type of damage you describe.

Any other suggestions are welcome, however, especially if someone else eventually has the same issue..

[kozikowski]

It probably won't give you a warm fuzzy feeling to know that the refrigerator-size machines that do Movie Magic® in Hollywood do exactly the same thing.

<<<Perhaps I was lucky in my unluckiness.>>>

You were totally lucky. If OS-X had left the drive full, you wouldn't have a working machine right now. See: Ice Pick in Brain.

<<<it's horrible to think that the Audacity development team and the OS X team both would have absolutely no safeguards to prevent your machine from being fried just because you forgot to hit pause or stop on an audio recording program.>>>

It is horrible, yes.

Koz

[asabove01]

Welp, Audacity just got put in the trash bin for good. I'm not going to risk my system to record audio, I'm sure there's something else out there.

[kozikowski]

Drop us a note if you find something.

Koz

[steve]

Welp, Audacity just got put in the trash bin for good. I'm not going to risk my system to record audio, I'm sure there's something else out there.

You don't need to use Audacity to crash your computer, there's lots of other ways to do it. The problem is simply that you started filling the bath, then fell asleep, and in the morning you found the kitchen flooded. So do you throw out the bath?

This problem is not specific to Macs either, I've managed to crash Windows and Linux computers by filling up the hard drives. Any program that can write to disk (which is just about any program) is capable of filling the disk and crashing the computer. In order to function, computers require some memory space, either in RAM or on disk. If there is no space available (because it is all full), the computer stops. Windows computers can do this quite easily, but even Nix machines can if you provide the right conditions.

The worst case I had was when I filled 100% disk space - well there was about 2kB free space, but not enough for the machine to boot. So I booted from a Live Linux CD, deleted a load of the trash that I had created from the hard drive, then booted normally - no harm done.

Moral of the story, don't fall asleep when you are running a bath, but if you do, make sure that you have a bucket and mop (a Live Linux CD) handy to clean up the mess.

[kozikowski]

Let's see if the poster comes up with anything better.

I don't think Knoppix Live CD is going to help here.

Koz

[asabove01]

Welp, Audacity just got put in the trash bin for good. I'm not going to risk my system to record audio, I'm sure there's something else out there.

You don't need to use Audacity to crash your computer, there's lots of other ways to do it. The problem is simply that you started filling the bath, then fell asleep, and in the morning you found the kitchen flooded. So do you throw out the bath?

This problem is not specific to Macs either, I've managed to crash Windows and Linux computers by filling up the hard drives. Any program that can write to disk (which is just about any program) is capable of filling the disk and crashing the computer. In order to function, computers require some memory space, either in RAM or on disk. If there is no space available (because it is all full), the computer stops. Windows computers can do this quite easily, but even Nix machines can if you provide the right conditions.

The worst case I had was when I filled 100% disk space - well there was about 2kB free space, but not enough for the machine to boot. So I booted from a Live Linux CD, deleted a load of the trash that I had created from the hard drive, then booted normally - no harm done.

Moral of the story, don't fall asleep when you are running a bath, but if you do, make sure that you have a bucket and mop (a Live Linux CD) handy to clean up the mess.

Any quality bathtub has a secondary draining location above the water line, that way if you were to fall asleep it doesn't overflow. So yes, I'd throw out the poorly designed bathtub you describe -- if the designers weren't intelligent enough to not include a secondary drain location in their design, I'd say screw them. People make mistakes, this is a fact. The question as a designer is: do you spend the extra 2 hours designing a secondary drain so that thousands of people who make the mistakes aren't spending thousands of dollars to repair water damage; or do you sit on your lazy ass and not care enough, rationalizing your laziness with the attitude of "well, it's their own fault. They deserve the thousands of dollars in damage for falling a asleep once".

Brilliant.

[kozikowski]

How goes the search?
Koz