1. don't ignore pinned post in this forum about posting OBS log from problem session
When you hit and the system doesn't promptly stop... that tends to mean OBS is overwhelmed and trying to catch up (and often recording will be a mess anyways), or has crashed, or something truly problematic.
So, yes, not surprised that if OBS didn't stop... and stayed that way for 2 hours... that system was (to be technical) 'hosed'
Once you hit Stop, there wasn't going to be anything after that.
If the system was stuck on 'stopping' you already had major issues on your hand. Fixing that before proceeding to anything else was necessary (how to do that depends on what exactly was wrong, your Operating System knowledge, etc)
My suspicion is that once you lost 'internet' that something else also went wrong? possibly plugin related... ???
When you hit Record, did you actually check OBS Stats or anything else (like Recording file location) to see that MKV being created and growing? Again, just my suspicion, that OBS never started Recording... or the Recording settings are wrong for your computer (ie ask too much computationally for what is available) and promptly choked
Such that there never was a MKV to recover... 'recording' never written to disk, so nothing to recover.. sorry
but that is a lot of guessing on my part with limited info from your post, so I could easily be wrong
As for avoiding this issue
- Record from the start (no reason to EVER trust that Internet will stay connected, especially with typical ISP best effort connections (vs business class connections with SLAs)
- Test in advance... including unplugging Internet... though what is hard to test is when there is a partial failures (like my ISP where their DNS stopped responding, but all else was fine... most users can't distinguish such issues)... and such 'partial' failures can cause unusual application behavior (which is expecting connection to work or not, but not, some ports/protocols working, others not).
then there are different software development maturity (and robustness) levels in various 3rd party plugins ... ymmv
- As for losing Internet connection... that is something most business network engineer types know how to solve for, most regular consumers don't.. realistically any informed recommendation will involve a detail understanding of your specific requirements, budget, and expertise of folks involved
I've not had a problem with OBS Studio reconnecting when my WAN linked failed or was overwhelmed. I'm not a fan of OBS Studio's default option settings for re-connecting, but it depends on scenario, so what 1 good default for a given circumstance won't be optimal for a different circumstance, and vice versa... so basically something for an end-user to RTFM, know their network situation and adjust accordingly...
- and don't use WiFi, and
- if lots of other users on network (ex Guest WiFi) make sure Quality of Service (QoS) is configured to prioritize your specific streaming traffic over random misc guest traffic
