Loss of sound after editing

[intuitist]

After much time spent meticulously editing glitches out of a recording, I save as an Audacity project file.
Then to my horror, I listen to the file and find that it is full of gaps...chunks of the recording have vanished into thin air !
This has now happened several times...
Mucho time wasted, mucho frustration.

Can anyone tell me what's going on?

[PGA]

Are you following "best practice" and doing a "File...Export..." as a WAV file after completing a recording session and before you start editing the recording? That way you can always go back to your original if things go wrong. If you are importing your recorded material, do you have Preferences...Import/Export option "Make a copy of uncompressed audio files before editing (safer)" selected? This option will include your imported audio data in the project file, rather than simply setting a pointer to where it was found on your disk drive. If you then delete, rename or move the original file, Audacity will still find the audio in the project file. Not having this option selected and then deleting, renaming or moving the audio file means that Audacity can no longer find it.

[steve]

The most likely cause is as PGA has suggested - your project had "dependencies" and you have either moved, deleted or renamed one or more of the dependencies. See here for a detailed explanation: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Audacity_Projects

[intuitist]

As you have suggested, I've set my Import/Export option to "Make a copy of uncompressed audio files before editing (safer)".
For the moment, this is working...fingers crossed that that's the full solution.
If any re-occurance, I'll explore the 'dependencies' further (looks a bit techy...).
Thanks both for your advice.