"blank" tracks in my Audacity project after a crash and an orphaned block file warning

Audacity 2.1.3 crashed on me yesterday while trying to save a recording I’d done tons of work on. I’d previously done recordings in this file several months ago, and finally got the band back together for a final run through of one of the musician’s parts. And after hours of work, it crashed on me.

When I reopened Audacity, I get this message:

"Warning - Orphan Block File(s)

Project check of folder XXXXXXXXXX found 3611 orphan block file(s). These files are unused by this project, but might belong to other projects. They are doing no harm and are small."

I select NOT to delete the orphaned files, so nothing should be deleted. But then I come to see that all my tracks are blank. The tracks, as I named them, are all there, but they got nothing in them to play or edit. They’re just blank tracks.

Yet when I look in my data folder I see tons of stuff still there.

Can I/should I somehow un-orphan those files? What sucks is that I had an older version of this saved months ago, and even if I have to lose all of yesterday’s work, it’s a shame that it seems even the work I did months ago is just gone.

I’m currently running this on Mojave, 10.14.2
2.7 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3
I have a terrabyte of storage and am only using about a third of that.

All other documents seem to open and play just fine in Audacity. In the past I’d gotten such orphan messages with other files and they never had such a problem that I can recall.

NOTE: I’m not opposed to downloading a newer version of Audacity to try and open them with that, but I worry that somehow this will mess up my chances of bringing this one back to life.

I’m saving the file and data folder to Google Drive and will attach a copy once it uploads.

BTW you can download the file and the data folder here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b_elk4A0E-d3I4AjgU9ZDwgEdckocf_x/view?usp=sharing (3.2 GB)

Unfortunately your .aup file has no references to the audio data, only references to the (empty) tracks. This project cannot be recovered from the supplied data. Your only chance is if you have backups somewhere, which I’m guessing you don’t.

I would recommend updating Audacity, though that will not help (or hinder) this particular project.
The current version of Audacity is 2.3.0 and is available via the Audacity website: https://www.audacityteam.org/download/
The next version (Audacity 2.3.1) is due to be released in January.