Audacity Forum

Hi,

I don't know whether you can help me or if it's irretrievable, but I have just made a rookie mistake. I recorded an hour long podcast. I saved the track, but then closed the track inside the window and then accidentally saved the program before I closed it, effectively saving an empty track over my podcast. Is there any way at all of restoring the previously saved version of the project?!

annabell wrote:I don't know whether you can help me or if it's irretrievable, but I have just made a rookie mistake. I recorded an hour long podcast. I saved the track, but then closed the track inside the window and then accidentally saved the program before I closed it, effectively saving an empty track over my podcast. Is there any way at all of restoring the previously saved version of the project?!

We put a warning in for just this case:

"If saved, the project will have no tracks"

with instructions to undo to get the tracks back on screen.

But if you saved the empty project anyway and closed it (or closed Audacity) then that's it, short of stopping all work on that drive and using Pandora Recovery or some such solution to recover the deleted .au files. Even if you could do that, the .au files are randomly numbered. They can be recovered using the 1.2 Crash Recovery Utility if you sort the .au files into timestamp order and rename them into a contiguous sequence. But they would only recover in absolutely correct order if this was a mono recording and you never edited it.

We used to have backup projects but it was a flawed implementation that saved an .aup.bak file but still referenced the current _data folder. Opening the aup.bak file would just have produced "missing blockfile" errors in your case. A proper backup (that you could do manually yourself any time by File > Save Project As, or better, File > Export > WAV) would require space to have its own _data folder.


Gale

Thanks! I realise that there are prompts in place, but I was busy talking at the time and like a proper numptie I wasn't concentrating properly when I shut the track down!

I've used Pandora on it, and got it back in about three hundred pieces. Thankfully it was jut a mono file (it was literally the minute we had finished recording), so I've got a long night ahead of me piecing it back together, but it's far less embarrassing than having to get everyone back together to re-record the thing

annabell wrote:I've used Pandora on it, and got it back in about three hundred pieces. Thankfully it was jut a mono file (it was literally the minute we had finished recording), so I've got a long night ahead of me piecing it back together

If Pandora recovered all the files, the sorting and renaming of the .au files should only take a minute with the correct tool, as should writing the recovery WAV file with http://www.mesw.de/audacity/recovery/ .



Gale