Audacity Forum

Hi there,

I am new to this board, and have only recently started working with Audacity as a multi-track mixer. So, I made my first colossal error. After working on a six track show for days, I had two songs on another window, and was getting ready to finalize things. I wanted to see the "history" which took over five hours to finally process. I was worried it was going to crash the whole system, which thankfully it did not.

But then I made the bonehead move of hitting the wrong "x" and closed the main show window, not the smaller two song window. Is there any way to retrieve what I did? I have read up on the recovery options. I have a bunch of files in my temp/audacity folder, but they all have the file extension .auf, not .au. Is there anything that I can do, or am I screwed? Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

Steve

gratefulphish wrote:Hi there,

I am new to this board, and have only recently started working with Audacity as a multi-track mixer. So, I made my first colossal error. After working on a six track show for days, I had two songs on another window, and was getting ready to finalize things. I wanted to see the "history" which took over five hours to finally process. I was worried it was going to crash the whole system, which thankfully it did not.

But then I made the bonehead move of hitting the wrong "x" and closed the main show window, not the smaller two song window. Is there any way to retrieve what I did? I have read up on the recovery options. I have a bunch of files in my temp/audacity folder, but they all have the file extension .auf, not .au. Is there anything that I can do, or am I screwed?

When you closed the window where you were doing most of the work, Audacity asked you if you wanted to "save changes". If you said yes, you will have saved a project file (*.aup) which you can open from the Files > Recent Files menu. If you said no, then the folder for that project in the Audacity temporary directory is emptied. There is nothing you can do short of using a file undelete program to try and recover the files before the disk sectors get overwritten. You'll need a second or external disk drive to try and recover those files.

The .auf files you can see now are for the project that is still open (they are .auf files not .au because I presume you imported WAV or AIFF files, which by default Audacity does not copy in). See avoiding audio loss due to dependent files.

If you are working on a project for that length of time, you should:

(a) File > Export a back up WAV file (if you want each track separately, select each track in turn then File > Export Selection)

(b) File > Save Project.

I'm sorry about waiting five hours for history. That's ridiculous - we'll try and look into that sometime.




Gale

Gale,

Thanks for getting back to me. I think that the history took so long, due to the number of edits that I had done. Is there a particular file undelete program that you have found to be best in trying to recover these files? Will they all have the .au file extension? Please let me know, as I really want to try this before starting all over again. Thanks.

Steve

gratefulphish wrote:Is there a particular file undelete program that you have found to be best in trying to recover these files? Will they all have the .au file extension?

Personally I use Recover My Files because it usually maintains the old file structure with the old file and folder names. Also it has native preview so you can usually listen to deleted files that it's found. But it isn't free so although it will find files for free, you have to pay to recover them.

For a free tool, try Pandora Recovery. It puts lots of older files in "unknown folders" so even a search won't really tell you where the files were actually deleted from. But I see it has the .au files deleted a few minutes ago from my audacity_temp folder, and names that folder correctly, so worth a try,

Yes the files should all have .au extension unless the project contained imported WAV or AIFF files.




Gale

gratefulphish wrote:After working on a six track show for days, I had two songs on another window, and was getting ready to finalize things. I wanted to see the "history" which took over five hours to finally process. I was worried it was going to crash the whole system, which thankfully it did not.

This problem has been fixed in the Nightly Builds so should also be fixed in the next 1.3.13 Beta Release.




Gale