Audacity Forum

Good evening, unfortunately I lost all the project aup files, but I have all the data_folders with the au files inside, is there a way to recover or recreate them? thanks

You need to find those .AUP files. They contain the instructions for how to reassemble the data fragments. Without the AUP file you just have a large collection of audio fragments.

steve wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 08, 2020 9:39 pm

You need to find those .AUP files. They contain the instructions for how to reassemble the data fragments. Without the AUP file you just have a large collection of audio fragments.

unfortunately I can no longer find the .aup files, I only have the folders with the audio fragments in .au format
How can I do?

giulio2020 wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 09, 2020 3:06 pm

How can I do?

You can't, not unless you want to listen to each 6 second fragment and figure out where each piece goes.

I just lost 8 projects and have nothing but the data files left. I know there isn't, but shouldn't there be a backup aup file located in the data folder?

Jebbers wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 26, 2020 5:12 pm

shouldn't there be a backup aup file located in the data folder?

It depends what has gone wrong. In many cases there is an "autosave" file which holds a backup of the project file. When Audacity is restarted it will automatically recognise the autosave file and offer to restore the project. When this happens, there is a very good chance that all, or most of the project can be recovered automatically.

One of the worst, but sadly most frequent problems, is if the computer is powered down while Audacity is running. If this occurs, then Audacity does not get chance to update it's autosave file and the project may be utterly destroyed.

As above, the little AU files are six seconds long. They alternate Left and Right if you have a stereo show.

You can use the computer file time and date stamps to get close, but unfortunately, Windows settings don't get you close enough to completely reconstruct a show.

So the best you can do is make baskets of files with the same Time/Date and line up the baskets. Then go into each basket, listen to, and unscramble them so they make sense. There's no good way to determine Left and Right, so you'll have to listen to the show on headphones and and pay attention to the times when your directional perception seems to do something weird.

Did you move the .AUP file into the _DATA folder? That's a pretty common mistake. They have to be separate and in the same location or folder.



Double click the .AUP file and the show should open.

This isn't it, but did you change the name of either the AUP file or the_DATA folder?

Koz

Did Windows Search fail to find them, or are you sifting through your files manually?

Koz

One more. What did you call the files? What is one exact filename?

Koz

Here's what happened. I did not rename the files. I simply edited some projects and stored them all in one folder a few months ago. When I went to fetch the files from the folder, the data files were there but the aup files were missing. This is not a common problem, but it must happen sometimes that aup files are deleted, or possibly lost in data backups. I checked the same folder in my backup drive and it's the same - missing aups.

Like I say, it's a very uncommon problem, whatever happened does not usually happen, but when it does happen it is a huge problem. Is there a simple backup of the aup that is stored in the data file.

Part of the problem is that every project consists of two separate files. So that can get a little clumsy sometimes. Not often though.