All tracks in my audacity file have been silenced??

So, I was in the process of recording, and Audacity crashed on me. No big deal, I’ll just reopen the program, is what I thought. But when I did, all 3 audacity files I had open before the crash had ALL of their tracks silenced. The tracks are still the same length as before, but now they have no sound. I’ve saved all 3 of these projects regularly before this, but now all my hours of work are gone and I don’t understand why?

I’m using Audacity 2.1.3. If anyone could help me I’d be extremely grateful.

So I am sorry your projects were lost. Unfortunately, Audacity projects sometimes get damaged. In 3.0.0 there was a design change to unify Audacity’s scattered file structure with the hope of reducing the potential for these kinds of problems. Personally, I feel this new structure is more reliable; others may disagree, so they may stay on 2.4.2. The new structure is certainly more immune to people moving or renaming their projects. And a corrupt project recovery tool is available for 3.x.

In any case, your project can be easily damaged if you are using a remote drive of any kind, such as a USB or networked drive (I recently had an issue when I there was a power glitch and the drive became unavailable although my laptop continued to plug away with its on-board battery power - what would you do?)

The best bet is backups. .WAV backups are always good, and pretty much mandatory for 2.x.