Lost my macbook to water and my dissertation citations

arosesackett

Hi friendly people,

I am new to this forum and am coming to you in desperation because I lost my computer to water damage (most of my data was backed up on my iCloud, just not my apps) and am having problems reloading my Zotero citations.

I am pretty sure I had Zotero synched to my old computer, but everything is empty when I log in with what I believe is my username. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where some data from Zotero could be hiding in my icloud or any suggestions for getting the citation data back?

Sincerely,
Amber

dstillman

This account has never synced before today — it's likely you just created an account but never set up syncing. If you have other email addresses, you could try logging in with those or resetting your password (assuming you still have access to them — if not, you can email us at support@zotero.org to check), but otherwise the data would only have been on the computer where you were using Zotero, and you would only have it if you made a backup of that data.

In general, see Locating Missing Zotero Data for what you'd be looking for, but if you weren't using Time Machine and didn't manually back up the data, I'm afraid it would be gone.

adamsmith

As a last-resort workaround (i.e., if all of the above fails), if you do have backups of dissertation chapters that use Zotero, you can use https://rintze.zelle.me/ref-extractor/ to at least partially repopulate your Zotero library, although it won't actually be linked to those citations anymore.