Recovery



In the event of a crash while Audacity has unsaved data (such as a recording that has not yet been saved as a project, or an existing project with unsaved changes), Audacity will attempt to recover that data on next launch from an autosave recovery file. If there were no unsaved changes at the time of the crash, there will be no recovery dialog - all you need to do is re-open the saved AUP file.
 * CrashRecovery.png
 * The project name in the list of recoverable projects includes the date and time of the autosave file, preceded by either the name of the project or by "New Project" for a project that was never saved as an .aup file.

Automatic Crash Recovery
Note that it is common if there are unsaved changes at the time of the crash for Audacity to warn of "file inconsistencies" when recovering the project. This usually means merely that there are "orphan block files" in the data that were there to enable undo or redo of a project action but which are now superfluous to the recovered project. If this was the case, you would see a note on opening that orphan files would be deleted on saving the project, but no warnings about other kinds of file error.
 * ''' Exits Audacity without any changes. The Automatic Crash Recovery dialog will reappear next time you launch Audacity.
 * ''' Discards the unsaved data. You will receive a prompt asking if you are sure this is what you want to do. If you confirm that you don't want to recover any projects, they will not be recoverable later.
 * ''' Attempts to recover the unsaved data and load the waveforms into Audacity. Note that the contents of the project History is not recoverable, nor is the text contents of a label whose text was being added or where there was no action that triggers autosave after closing the new label..

Manual Recovery
If the Automatic Crash Recovery does not appear after a crash with unsaved changes, or the recovered audio cannot be corrected by searching for files, it may be possible to recover a single, unedited mono recording using crash recovery tools written for previous versions of Audacity. Stereo or edited audio is unlikely to be recovered in the correct sequence.


 * In order to use the crash recovery tools, it is essential to rename the unsaved .au files to a consecutive alphanumeric sequence. See the crash recovery page for help.


 * If you had never saved a project before the crash, the .au files will be in Audacity's temporary folder, whose location can be found by looking in Directories Preferences.


 * If you had saved the project previously, the .au files will be in the _data folder inside the directory containing the .aup project file.