Audacity Forum

I saved my project about an hour before a power outage crashed my 'puter. Everything is up and running but the audio is still gone. Also, cannot find my temp file. Any help?

Was Audacity open and running when the power went away? If it was managing the temp file at the time, there is no temp file. The Project should have survived, though. Were you editing the show when the power dumped?

We warn people often to Export As WAV at the end of a critical capture session. That will give you a safety sound file if everything else dies. Audacity Projects are large, complicated, and brittle.

There are some very good disaster recovery tools now.

Crash Recovery
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... shRecovery

Koz

Jimmy sent me extra information in a private message. Please don't do that because it makes it more difficult to handle the issue in the topic. Even if a topic is not answered at once, someone will usually go looking for any unanswered topics when they have time.

I am operating audacity 1.3.7 on a Mac OS X. Last Friday, as I was working on a large, complex audio project we had a lightening storm resulting in a power outage. Luckily, though (or so I thought), I had just saved it. When the computer started up again, however, all the audio was gone from the project. The audio clips were just thin lines.

I know the .au clips are in a file because I see them (there are over 700 individual little segments) however the audacity recovery program(s) will not work on my Mac. Do you have any suggestions to try restoring this project or getting those audio files re-organized and assembled? Is there a way to do it with Time Machine, that you know of? I desperately need it for a potential employment situation.

There are versions of Audacity Recovery Utiltity specifically for Mac:
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... ry_Utility

They should work if you follow the instructions on the crash recovery page to resort the .au files into timestamp order then rename them into an alphanumerical sequence (so that the first file in the sequence is the first time stamped file and the last in the sequence is the last time stamped file).

As far as I know Time Machine saves backups every hour so isn't likely to be any help unless the .au files currently don't actually contain any audio. If you had saved the project prior to that last save, there should be an .aup.bak file. Opening that may allow you to retrieve some audio within Audacity, but it will probably show errors so if you open that you must be careful to tell Audacity not to delete any files it says are "orphaned" or "missing".


Gale