I am aware of the limit for files of 2gig for wav format.
and heard that audacity got around this by doing it in ‘chunks’
6 second chunks so it seems.. after recovering all the .au files.

for whatever reason. it did indeed crash later on in the night.
all files were lost completely.
I found a recovery tool, undelete (from my tuneUp utilities program)
found all the .au files.
undeleted them.

Then tried to apply the audacity recovery tool.
It did not work.
I will attempt again using smaller groups (approx 1 hour or so)

BUT ultimately..
everything is there, and not a thing was lost.
I just have to figure out how to combine 6 second chunks for 5 hours of music :)

So I have a new friend in audacity
even though this could be a pain in the butt putting it all back together.
it is at least ALL there.

If you are using the import raw data on the tiny AUP files then you might have some issues, although it is possible to line each one up end to end, and attempt a recovery that way.

however if you are use the Raw Data feature on the Wav files created by the recovery tool then i could see it really helping. Thanks for the input!