While working on my latest project, I'd just completed a trial mix and was doing a bit of tidying up, moving files etc, when there was a mains power blip as I was halfway though a move operation. The blip was just long enough to make the computer re-boot
When the computer finished sorting out the file system I was dreading what I'd find. The latest mix file was still there, but the 'master' construction file was missing. Everything else seemed more-or-less OK. One of the synth files didn't have the latest changes, but they were minor and reasonably easy to re-do. So I started put it all back together.
Albeit tedious, this wasn't difficult until I went to add the most recent guitar part. This had vanished without trace. Now I was angry
This had taken quite a few hours to get right, and included a few happy 'accidents'. I didn't fancy the prospect of starting over, and besides, I might eventually get something similar but just wouldn't be the same
Clearly this was time for a beer and a period of self-pity, and my mind started to revolve around thoughts like 'lost, never to be found again' drifting to railway stations and the lost and found office. Hey wait a minute, Linux has a lost and found directory
In considerable haste I returned to the computer. Now the lost+found directory is one level up from the normal user directory and is used by the file system to dump any file pointers that don't seem to be referenced anywhere - exactly what would happen if a move operation was interrupted.
There were just three anonymous looking un-typed files there, so it was a matter of trying to force-load them into various programs and see what came out. One was a corrupted Rosegarden file, which was really unusable. It was probably the interim file with the changes I'd made, but no matter, that problem had been resolved. The second seemed to be a text file, but was actually an XML file (these are text based for cross-compatibility). The third one loaded into Audacity and there was my missing guitar part, complete and unscathed
Needless to say, everything is copied across to backup discs and my other machine. It was just rotten luck that the power failure came just before I would have done that anyway. I always back up at the end of a session.
