Crash Recovery - Thoroughly Confused

[sagemoon]

I am VERY sorry to post when you obviously have a wiki article on this exact problem, however my friend and i that have just recorded separate audio files for a radio podcast show we create have had an issue. His Audacity client crashed - he clicked NO on the temporary delete box that popped up. Now we are THOROUGHLY confused on how to go about recovering the data. Hes not going to close his audacity window until we get this solved. We really dont know how to follow the instructions, and although it might be obvious and step-by-step to you guys, it looks like japanese to us.

What I am asking is if any of you might be willing to get in contact with us through an instant messenger, possibly on a mic chat, to help walk us through this. Hes a bit more computer savvy than I am, however he is still totally lost, and we need someone to tell us a step-by-step of how to click and what to click, lest we lose our 2 hour radio podcast show file..........which we probably will not do again if we lose this file.

He lives in the UK, I am in Maine.
He has Windows Vista,
And we both have the latest Beta version of Audacity.

I would be very very grateful if anyone would be willing to help us.

[Gale Andrews]

I am VERY sorry to post when you obviously have a wiki article on this exact problem, however my friend and i that have just recorded separate audio files for a radio podcast show we create have had an issue. His Audacity client crashed - he clicked NO on the temporary delete box that popped up. ...He has Windows Vista, And we both have the latest Beta version of Audacity.

What "temporary delete" box popped up exactly? When you restart after a crash, Audacity 1.2 will ask you if you want to delete temporary files. If you saw that dialogue you do not have "the latest Beta version of Audacity". The latest Beta (currently 1.3.12) will ask you on restart if you want to recover the unsaved project, and if recovery works you just have to click Yes and you get the project back.

Please look at Help > About Audacity and give us the exact three-digit version number of the version that crashed.



Gale

[sagemoon]

Aha! ><

Well, it seems that my friend downloaded the version 1.2.6. That definitely explains a lot of the confusion we were having while looking for help online. Im pretty dumb for not realizing this, I'm sorry I've been so confusing on this practical piece of information.

I suppose my next question is, is it possible to recover data from the original Audacity version then?

While researching things, while waiting for a reply here, we found a youtube video about the process of recovering data, using the "Audacity Recovery Utility" program. We went through the steps together while he screen-shared with me on Skype. We managed to get to the point of recovering the file, and the computer does have a tiny bit less hard drive space, so we know the recovery block is on his computer, however for some reason we cannot seem to find it.

The thing that seems to be very confusing is that although the Utility program seemed to recover the files (looking like b001 ect) from what we could visually see on the screen, and said the recovery was successful (we put in 2 for the number of channels because there were 2 lines across the screen when we recorded the file as opposed to the 1 that was in the youtube tutorial vid, which the guy said was "mono" as opposed to "stereo"), however we have searched "b001" on the C drive to find the files, and have not found them whatsoever. the temp folder seems to be empty, from what we could see. perhaps we are not following the filepath right? im not sure what to think, because we have literally searched "b001" to find those sorts of files and came up with nothing. We searched on the C drive for "recovery block" and got nothing.

We through the filepath to get to where the temp folder should be, when after recovering it said to go to File, and then Open, and then back to the temp file location again, and we cannot seem to find it.

He then made sure to check "show hidden files and folders" on his Vista settings, and went back and tried again, and it still didn't seem to show it.

I am sorry I must be very aggravating for you. I am very dim when it comes to these levels of technology but I am trying to be forthcoming, respectful, and appreciative.

[Gale Andrews]

If the recovery was successful, two files would have been written, called:

recovery_block1_channel1.wav
recovery_block1_channel2.wav

Note the underscores (not spaces) between the words.

The files would have been written to the folder that you told the recovery utility to look in. If that was the Audacity temporary folder, you can find the location of that folder by clicking Edit > Preferences: Directories.



Gale

[sagemoon]

Hello Again.

I apologize for such a delayed response. It was due to in-crowd riots. -sighs- Podcasting is dangerous...I guess I need to wear my helmet next time.

I am going to post the filepath. If someone could tell me how to follow this filepath, that would be splendid. We have tried to follow and and we do not find the files.

C:UsersTHERAI~1AppDataLocalTempaudacity_1_2_temp

We get to the point were we find the "Temp" Folder, and then....no folders that say audacity. Just some random things.

Halp?

[steve]

Was the project "Saved" at any time?
When you Save a project, the data files (the little .au files) are moved from the temporary folder to the project "_data" folder at whatever location you saved the project.

Have you tried doing a search using Windows "Search" tool for "audacity_1_2_temp"?