Recovering deleted collections in a group library

mtebbe

I know this topic has been covered several times, but I have a question about recovering accidentally deleted collections from a group library. I have a group library with several hundred members that we use for teaching a course once a year and don't use much in the interim. While preparing to teach next quarter, I realized that someone had (presumably accidentally) deleted a critical set of collections. I have no idea how recent this deletion was or who did it. Given that it may have been months since the deletion, is there any way for me to recover the collections? I know the files themselves are still there but they were in something like 30+ collections that I don't want to remake.

dstillman

Only if someone in the group has a local backup from before this happened (or, more precisely, from before they synced down the deletions to their computer).

If this just happened, you would be able to restore a deleted collection from one of the automatic backups. If it happened earlier, someone with a backup from before then would have to restore from that. Note the specific instructions for restoring collections.

If you provide the first two letters of the group name, we can tell you when the deletions happened, which might help someone check for an appropriate backup.

An upcoming version of Zotero will make it possible to restore a deleted collection from the trash, but that wouldn't necessarily even help here if this happened months ago, since the trash would auto-empty after 30 days by default. We're thinking about other ways to prevent accidental deletions in group libraries.

mtebbe

That's more or less what I thought, thank you! Knowing when the deletions happened would be great. The first two letters of the group are "En," the ID is (I think) 2385011.

A related question on preventing deletions--is there a way to set permissions for different users in a group such that only certain members can delete collections (or files)? If not, that would definitely be a helpful feature in the future.

dstillman

It looks like 66 collections were deleted on May 2 of this year.

is there a way to set permissions for different users in a group such that only certain members can delete collections (or files)?

No, but it's a common request. It would probably have to be some variation of that where you could still delete things you've added yourself, at least for a period of time, but we can probably help people avoid most of these accidental mass-deletions.