At file recovery dialog accidently clicked "NO"

It appears I’ve screwed up a project significantly. Everything seemed fine at last close, however I opened audacity up today and received the filed recovery dialog. I thought this was odd, since I had remembered saving and closing proper. I clicked “no” and reviewed the project, noticing that a significant portion of my narration track was missing from the middle. OH SH**.

Is there any way to go into the temp files and find this recording manually? It looks like I had highlighted the ass end of the track, and dragged it over the rest up to the middle, thereby overwriting the middle of the narration track. The rest appears fine.

Any thoughts? I’ve since closed and opened the file a few times… but not saved it.

… I thought not. I am hosed, aren’t I? Lol at least it isn’t like an un-repeatable interview with someone where I can never get it back. It’s just narration lines.

I think so.

Which version of Audacity were you using?

For future reference:

In those circumstances I would

a) accept the recovery

b) immediately save that recovered project to a different filename

c) then check the recovered project against what you think you had saved

Note that step a does NOT overwrite your existing Saved project (if any)

Peter

I was using 3.0.2.

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I think so.

Which version of Audacity were you using?
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Uh oh… now I can’t even open the project… :neutral_face:
MUWABH Error.JPG

Ok I got it opened by copy and pasting the file, but now the vocal track clips are shuffled in a lot of places…

Anything you’ve heard of before?

Disk I/O error???

Where are the disks? External/Network/Cloud? Audacity doesn’t like that very much. You should be doing all production on your roomy, clean, internal drive.

Did you double-record the Important Interview in any way? Leave your phone recording in addition to the main recording?

This is an interview I made on my iPhone in a restaurant.

https://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/clips/Interview-Cafe-SampleClip.mp3

This is a radio interview I shot in Los Angeles. The stuff on the left is the main recording into Audacity. The Rode thing on the right is a second recorder.

I File > Export a WAV sound file immediately after the performance. Then Save an Audacity Project if I think of it. WAV files are more stable than Projects.

I’m not the editor, so I don’t worry about drives, but the actual editors are all working on large, roomy, well-behaved internal drives.

Koz

Anything you’ve heard of before?

If Audacity goes crazy in the middle of an edit, then the instructions of voice order can be lost. If you got the voices back at all, then you got lucky and you may be able to reconstruct the interview.

The newer Audacity versions have File > Save Project > Backup Project… That produces an isolated Project not hard-linked to the current edit. Use a different name and use good file naming hygiene. No punctuation marks other than -dash- and underscore.

Do everything on an internal drive.

A backup can be handy if the current edit loses its mind. Edit a copy of the backup in you need to. Not the actual backup.

Koz