Audacity Forum

TIMELINESS IS OF THE ESSENCE

I've been using Audacity for many years and consider myself an expert user. However, I just spent two days recording multiple tracks. when I hit CTRL-S to save ... I got the "close project without saving" prompt. So, I must've fat-fingered CTRL-S. Unfortunately, I also accidentally hit RETURN.

I know that Audacity has very good recovery functions as I've triggered them many times. However, this time, I am not so lucky. How can I recover my data? Where was it all stored?

FYI: I was able to recover 99% of the .au files using a program called recuva along with two .autosave files.

Anyway, I put the .autosave files in appdata/roaming/audacity/autosave and then put all the .au files in appdata/local/temp/audacity_temp/project5718. When I restart audacity, it prompts me to recover but then chokes on the whole process completely.

Anyway, time is no longer of the essence as I have recovered as many of the files as I could. Of the 10,000 or so .au files, only a handful were unrecoverable as they were overwritten by the process of downloading and installing the recuva tool.

Any help on this tomorrow would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Hmmm... I also see the pattern of which subdirectories all these .au files should be in. I can write an AutoIt program to whip them into shape tomorrow. maybe that will solve all this. I can say for certainty using import raw on one of these .au files does absolutely nothing useful.

There's a section in the manual about crash recovery that may help: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/recovery.html

steve wrote:There's a section in the manual about crash recovery that may help: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/recovery.html

Yes, steve, I've seen that but I still can't recover. I'm not sure what the whole "Stereo or edited audio is unlikely to be recovered in the correct sequence" thing means as, like most people, the whole point of a project is to edit audio and, yes, some of that audio is in stereo format simply because the world converted to stereo almost 50 years ago.

Audacity saves the audio data in randomly numbered "block files" (".AU")
The .AU files are stored in a data tree with no more than 100 files per folder.

When the project is Saved, the .AUP file holds all the information necessary to reassemble the block files to recreate the project.
The .AUP file is XML format and contains plain text.

While working in Audacity, a ".autosave" file is created. This is very similar to the .AUP file but does not have the final closing </project> tag.

Automatic crash recovery is triggered when Audacity finds a ".autosave" file.

Automatic crash recovery reads the .autosave file and then tries to locate the block files that belong with project.
If you can put the .autosave file and all of the .au files back into the temp folder in the correct sub-folders, then launch Audacity, Audacity will read the .AUP file and then look for the .AU files. Any block files that are missing will be replaced with silence, and the problem logged in the log file. To see the log file: "Help > Show Log"

The problem that you will have is getting all of the .AU files into the right folders so that Audacity can find them.
The log file will tell you which files it can't find and where those files need to be located.

In the "special case" of an unedited mono recording, the "time stamp" (creation time) of the .AU files will be in chronological order, so even without the .AUP file it is "possible" to recreate the project, by sorting the .AU files into date order and reassembling them end to end. This does not apply to edited projects because the creation time of the .AU files will not be in the order necessary to reassemble the tracks. Also, data recovery tools (such as "Recuva") are unlikely to retain the original time stamp.

I have restored the .AUTOSAVE files into "C:UsersMeAppDataRoamingAudacityAutoSave" and all of the .AU files into the correct temp directory and then correct subdirs (ex; "C:UsersMeAppDataLocalTempaudacity_tempproject5718e00d0ae000a0s2.au") but, alas, Audacity comlpetely chokes on this.

Upon reentering Audacity, I get the nice little "Automatic Crash Recovery" window showing the project I was working on. When I clilck on the "Recover Projects" button, I get the "Error Importing" message;
NOTE: this particular project is only 5 tracks of audio, yet, the number of .AU files is tremendously high. I have 38 subdirs each with about 255 files totalling just under 10,000 files.

jaja714 wrote:Audacity did not recognize the type of the file

Change the file extension to ".txt" and post it as an attachment. I'll have a look to see if it looks anything like a proper .autosave file.
Did you say that you had recovered 2 .autosave files? If so, post both of them.

jaja714 wrote:NOTE: this particular project is only 5 tracks of audio, yet, the number of .AU files is tremendously high. I have 38 subdirs each with about 255 files totalling just under 10,000 files.

Audacity projects are big, particularly while you are working on them. By default the audio data is in high resolution "32 bit float" format, and whenever you change the audio data, the old data is retained as "Undo data" until the project is closed.

Got it steve ... here you go!

FYI: these files do not look as much like AUP files as we thought as a lot of XML header stuff is missing. Further, I don't see any reference in the AUTOSAVE file indicating what the project number is.

NOTE: Why were there two AUTOSAVE files when I was only working on one?