Lost all of my annotations on a couple of different files

karinamochoa

I added notes/highlighted text to a couple of different PDFs across a couple devices. I added notes and annotations on my laptop and when I switched to my desktop, I couldn't see them. When I reopened my laptop, I saw the annotations there but they shortly disappeared. I have sync on, and it is my understanding that Zotero saves everything automatically. Why can't I see my annotations for these PDFs in the side bar? Are they lost?

dstillman

What's the 8-character folder name for the PDF if you right-click and select Show File?

karinamochoa

@dstillman 8G8WQKTV, JJCXDSA4, SDGPFT9C, 3TQKZBXA, XC7C7GUF, and UGWRQZWU

dstillman

Go to your Zotero data directory and look at the zotero.sqlite.bak and/or zotero.sqlite.1.bak files to see if they have modification times from after you created these annotations and before they disappeared. Copy those files to another folder for backup.

Then, if possible, upload them to the DB Repair Tool and post the Upload IDs here. You can ignore the download links the tool provides, but the Upload IDs will let us take a look at the database backup files to see if we can figure out what happened and help you restore any available data.

dstillman

@karinamochoa: We looked into this and discovered that there was, in fact, a serious bug where performing certain actions on an attachment in the web library could wipe out all of its annotations. We pushed a fix for that earlier today, so this should no longer happen, and it was limited to the web library. It should be possible to restore all of these annotations using the automatic backups I mention above, and we can help you with that, but you'll need to make backups of those .bak files before they're automatically replaced with newer copies. (We could potentially recover them from online backups, but it would take much longer.)

Very sorry for this. We're adding additional tests to the web library to make sure something like this doesn't happen again.

dstillman

@karinamochoa: And you can actually skip the DB Repair Tool steps, since it's clear what happened here. In terms of a fix, see Restoring from the Last Automatic Backup. Probably the easiest thing to do is to temporarily disable auto-sync, swap in one of the .bak files as explained there, confirm that the annotations are present, and then export the PDF with annotations. You can then add the exported file back to Zotero to create a separate copy of the PDF. When you then sync, it will pull down changes from the server, including the deletions, but the new attachment won't be affected. You can then import the embedded annotations from the File menu of the PDF reader and continue using those annotations as you were before.