Missing childnotes -- maybe due to linked Research Rabbit

emilycfox

I just realized that I'm missing some very important childnotes on some of my Zotero sources. I think it might have been because I linked my Zotero to Research Rabbit to play around with that a few days ago. I think I deleted the "comments" under sources which were annoying in Research Rabbit, but I didn't realize these were (maybe?) the childnotes I had in Zotero and that it would delete those out of my Zotero library!!! Is there anyway to get these back / restore them?? They aren't in my Zotero trash because I didn't delete them thru Zotero.

adamsmith

you could check old back-ups, both automatic and regular: https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#restoring_your_zotero_data_from_a_backup

emilycfox

Thanks! I read thru that page before posting, and I just did again. I'm a bit confused tho about if what I'm looking for is there.

Here's what my Zotero Data Directory (in default location, on iOS) contains:
zotero.sqlite (last updated today)
zotero.sqlite-journal
zotero.sqlite.1.bak (from May 7, deletion happened May 5 so this isn't far enough back)
zotero.sqlite.bak (from yesterday)
Folders: locate, logs, pipes, storage (has tons of 8-character subfolders with 1 pdf file each), styles, tmp, translators

So it doesn't seem that I have an automatic backup from far enough back. Does Zotero only store the most recent previous backup? I don't have any manual back-ups on an external hard drive -- though now I definitely will do this, I hadn't realized that my iCloud and external hard drive backups of my desktop and documents wouldn't contain Zotero things (which are in the Users folder).

Is there anyway to see previous library versions of several syncs ago? Or is there a history of previous syncs anywhere?

dstillman

It stores two automatic backups by default — the .bak and .1.bak files you see there. If you don't have another backup from further back, I'm afraid there wouldn't be any way to recover these.

(ResearchRabbit should arguably move things to the trash instead of deleting them outright.)

dstillman

hadn't realized that my iCloud and external hard drive backups of my desktop and documents wouldn't contain Zotero things

To be clear, a normal Time Machine backup to an external drive would certainly back up your Zotero data, and that's certainly what we'd recommend (for Zotero and everything else on your computer) . But if you're using some other backup method, that might not include all your files.

emilycfox

Ok, thanks for all the explanation you provided! Luckily there weren't a lot of these notes, and I can recreate them in a few hours.

I've reached out to Research Rabbit, so I'm hoping they might have a history log or something like that -- but yes! I wish they didn't delete things outright or had at least provided some type of notice that deleting things on RR would delete them in your Zotero library as well because I didn't even know that "importing" a folder would create a two-way sync relationship.