Recreating SQlite file

John Medaille
After a computer meltdown, I attempted to restore Zotero to its previous state. The storage folder was backed up, but not the sqlite file. Restoring the storage folder is insufficient. Is there a way to get zotero to recreate the SQlite file, or have I just lost all the information?
  • Tjowens
    The sqlite file contains all of your Zotero data. So if you do not have it there is little that you can do. See http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data

    If your using Zotero 2.0 and you had synced your data up to the Zotero servers you could just sync up with the server and pull down the data.
  • John Medaille
    All the data is there in storage. Isn't there some way to import it?
  • Tjowens
    The storage folder has your files, it does not have any data about those files.
  • John Medaille
    Exactly, but surely there is a way to import data?
  • adamsmith
    no. there isn't - it's just a bunch of files without the sqlite - you can use the "retrieve metadata" function to re-import some of the data, at least for pdfs, but that's really all there is, sorry.
  • dstillman
    Specifically, you could create a smart folder in your OS to display only PDF files within the backup storage directory (moved out of the way) and drag those into Zotero and then use Retrieve Metadata. But that's it.
  • Bionatsci
    Just on the off-chance (pretty unlikely that it applies in this case, but it is worth a shot), do you have any backed up files named something similar to zotero.sqlite.bak. These are "automatic backups" Zotero makes when closing firefox or during updates. They could potentially be quite out of date, but you can restore from them as described at the top of this thread.

    This would only apply if you had backed up your whole Zotero data directory, but for some reason backup had failed for the sqlite file. Like I say, a long shot, but I wanted to make sure all the bases were covered.
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