Restoring a project (CLOSED)

Hello, today I recorded my voice for almost 2 hours of playing through Audacity on Windows 10. After that, my computer monitor suddenly turned off and I had to restart the computer. Going into Audacity, I was offered to restore the project, when I clicked on “Restore” my audio recording did not appear and just a white bar of audio appeared on the main screen. I restored this empty project but don’t know what to do next. Tell me, please, for me it is very important, since the sound was written only in this program

Why was that? Did your computer crash?

How much free disk space does your computer have?

Which version of Audacity?

Most likely due to overheating, the monitor turned off by itself. This sometimes happens.
The places where I write audio are more than 150GB, this should definitely be enough
And my version: 2.3.0

How did you determine where the audio data was written? Did you modify Audacity’s temp folder location? Is it an external drive?

Unfortunately I have a bad feeling about this, and expect that the project is probably gone forever.

You know that version is obsolete? The current version is 3.1.3 (Audacity ® | Downloads)

No, temporary files are written to my C Disk, on which 8GB is available, and I save the finished files to another external one.
I read that it is possible to open temporary files from an unsaved project through Audacity again and individually match these 6 second files together. But merging almost 3 thousand files takes a very long time. And yes, they have disappeared from me.
Well, is there any other solution?
Now I know.

By default, Audacity records in 32-bit float format, 44100 Hz. That works out at around 10 MB per minute mono / 20 MB per minute stereo.
2 hours would be about 1.3 GB mono / 2.6 GB stereo.

Also, Windows likes to have a fair bit of free disk space for system maintenance tasks. I’ve often seen “10% disk space” quoted as a minimum amount of free space to keep Windows happy (I’m not sure how accurate that is).

So 8GB free is running quite close to the limit for long recordings.


For the old Audacity 2.x series, yes that is possible, but only for fresh recordings before any editing or processing.
There’s a tool to help join the .AU data blocks together, but first it is necessary to sort and name them in chronological order. (Editing or processing messes up the file creation timestamp, making it near impossible to sort the blocks into the correct order.

Even with fresh, unedited recordings, stereo tracks are tricky because the left and right channels will probably have the same time stamps, so it is often not possible to preserve stereo information (though a mono mix is probably better than nothing).


You’ve checked in Audacity’s Temp folder and there’s no “.AU” files there?
If that’s the case, and if you don’t have a backup, then I think that’s the end. :frowning:

Thanks for the help. I decided not to worry and last night I downloaded a new version of Audasity and re-recorded the game with a new voice acting;)

Thanks for the update.