Five or six duplicates after sync

postiffm

For probably 10 years I ran Zotero stand-alone, no problems. Yesterday I finally decided to go ahead and let Zotero sync to my account on this site, as it was urging me to do.

I looked at my Web Library, and it had 5 or 6 duplicates of every item, all with date added and modified in July of 2015. I thought something strange was going on with the website, so I ignored it. Today I look at Zotero on my desktop PC, and it has the same!

Now I'm concerned! What has happened, and how to fix it?

postiffm

I just quit Zotero, moved the offending database and replaced it with a .bak backup copy from back when it was correct. Worked fine. Except since sync was still turned on, it started syncing with the copy on this site, and started bringing down all the duplicate copies again. For now the solution is to turn off sync, and go back to my old ways.

dstillman

See Restoring Your Zotero Data From a Backup and Overwriting Synced Changes.

The way you would get duplicates is by using export/import to copy a library to another computer and then syncing both — that creates totally separate items as far as Zotero is concerned. The easiest way to fix this would just be to sort the items list by Date Added (which will reflect when the imports were done) and delete entire sets at the time.