Recovering files from crashed sessions

Alright, here’s the story.

I was recording a live set… the wires were a mess because we had to set up in a hurry on a different stage than expected. During the set, I rebooted the recording computer by accident when I stepped on the power strip’s automatic reset (stupidest “feature” ever… those strips are garbage, btw, never buy one with it).

The question is… is there any way to recover what was recorded up to the point of the reboot? The .wav’s in the directory with the n-track file are all 0 length. But I wasn’t sure if they’re dropped into a temp file somewhere first. I assume it has to be on disk somewhere. Any chance I can get them back?

Edit:
Okay, scandisk found the data and I converted it to files (6 files, about 70 megs each). Any idea how to get this data readable? I tried to use Sound Forge’s recovery script to build the file, but all I got was noise. Is there a way to get sensible data from this?

what is the file extension?

try typing .wav after one of them and see if they are readable as wav files. I think the header is what describes the file type and everything after is just samples in a wav, so hopefully n-track wrote a header and was just filling in the rest.

as for the temp folder, look in your preferences to see where you set the temp and working folders.

If they’re not readable as .wav files, you might try to open them with a wave editor that reads “raw” (ie. header-less) PCM data and type in the sampling rate and bit depth as asked. Cool Edit does, probably a lot of others too.

If you had the auto-save feature in n-Track set up you should be able to recover at least to the last auto-save point. Anything after that would be lost, I fear, since it had not been saved to your HD at that point. When searching for the files, look to find them by “Date Modified” and look for any files that were created or modified on that fatal date. That should help you to cut to the chase without facing thousands of unrelated files.

HTH

Don

Well, I tried doing a batch convert on the raw data in Cool Edit, but it’s no go. I’m still just getting noise. I think I’m screwed anyway, since I realized each file is only 75 megs… to have gotten all the data to that point, they’d have to be about 400 megs each, so I think it’s a loss.

Thanks for the help though. Time to start trying to recreate the live set from scratch… ugh.

One word. Err, make that one acronym. UPS. Buy one. Use it. While not in DAW work a UPS has saved my butt on MANY occasions.

TG

Well, the big problem was that the power strip had an automatic reset that’s really easy to hit. Honestly, a less crappy power strip would have been just as good. hehe… but yeah, maybe using a dedicated UPS for the actual computer boxes is a good idea for next time.