Request guidance, I cut and lost Audio i wanted to keep

I have ~ 5 hour audio file and I had wanted to save about an hour of it. First thing I did was make a copy of the whole recording ( which now does not seem to exist) What I did was selected the hour I wanted, pressed cut and started a new session, pasted the selected segment and Exported to an MP3. What I ended up with is the full recording minus the part I wanted to keep, also I do not seem to have the copy anywhere that I cannot find anywhere that I was sure to make before hand. ( I am sure I was working on the copy),

is there a way to recover the full original recording? I do not seem to have a temp folder in the Session Data, and I did close and restart Audacity foolishly.

Thank you for any guidance, I would like to have this but in reality it is music and I am not sure I want to spend the 100 plus dollars on what seems to be the recovery software.





You seem to have answered your own question. :frowning:

For future reference:

once you have finished a recording like this the first thing to do is to export a WAV file of the recording as a master copy of the raw recording. For extra safety make a copy of this on an external USB disk/stick.

Then you can always reload that back into Audacity if you corrupt your project,

Peter.