Audacity crashed, it didn't restore the project, now all of the audio is gone, how do I get it back?

[Joshish]

After the program crashed and I re-opened it, the restore didn't work. Now I have the program file and a folder with many .au files but nothing is showing up in Audacity itself. The named tracks are there but all of the audio is blank. Is there any way to restore the audio and get it back?

I would really appreciate it if someone can help me or point me in the right direction.

[kozikowski]

The little AU files are six second sound files and should play in Audacity. Do they? (don't save anything).

You can also open up the AUP project manager file in a text editor. Again, don't save anything.

It should have pseudo-English words in it. This one's been scrubbed up a bit for its picture, but it's real.You can see the project name is burned into the programming (red box).



Was this an edit? Were you editing, cutting, or correcting the work? How long or big was the show?

Koz

[Joshish]

Yes the AU files play when I open, didn't save anything.

Yes it can open in text-edit.

I had about 20 takes from string players this afternoon and I was going to add some silence and then export each file as a wav file. It crashed, tried to re-open, received this message and all the audio gone in the project:

Screen Shot 2020-12-15 at 10.37.47 PM.png (48.63 KiB) Viewed 587 times

[steve]

Which version of Audacity are you using? (Look in "Audacity menu > About Audacity".)

[Joshish]

2.4.2

[steve]

I don't think it will be possible to recover the project.

We can try to work out what went wrong, which may help avoid future problems.

Was the project called "1.aup"?
Where was the project saved?

Do you recall what you were doing when Audacity crashed the first time?

[Joshish]

Painful.

Yes it was called 1.aup

Saved to my hard drive, under documents

I was going to use the function to generate silence and it froze up. I waited about 10 minutes and then force quit, thinking it would not be a big deal and that all of the audio would still be there as I had saved beforehand. Much to my dismay it was all gone.

[steve]

That project should have 1796 ".au" files in the "1_data" folder, but the error message suggests that there are a lot less than that. What is the total size of the "1_data" folder?
How much free space is there in the Documents folder?

[Joshish]

5.18 gigs free space

Size of 1_date folder: 1,140,577,246 bytes (1.15 GB on disk) for 1,987 items

[steve]

Size of 1_date folder: 1,140,577,246 bytes (1.15 GB on disk) for 1,987 items

That's interesting.
I'm not sure how macOS counts "items", but there's enough data their for the project, yet only 181 files reported as "orphans" (not belonging to any project).

Can you do a manual search to see if any of these files are present within "1_data":
eff12f76.au
eff12126.au
eff1e0a6.au

Just in case there is a chance of recovery, it may be worth making a backup copy of the entire "1_data" folder.