How to change "date added" date?

alonzo_riley · April 11, 2010

I work on a few computers and one of them had the computer date set a couple months off when I was adding citations. The date, of course, has been fixed but the date added remains (and shows that I've added them in the future!) It's not a huge issue, but it makes the sort order a little annoying as I have to look down about eight citations to find the one that I've just added.

I only have to wait about a month more until they, too, are in the past, but this might be really aggravating had the clock been off by a year or ten. I'm sure there's a simple fix. Anyone know what that might be?

Rintze · April 12, 2010

Can't you just duplicate the affected items on the computer with the correct date and delete the old copy? In a quick test, the only problem seems to be that attachments have to be copied over manually.

ajlyon · April 12, 2010

And in order to set the date backwards, you can adjust the computer's time accordingly.

alonzo_riley · April 13, 2010

No wait, that's not right. I don't think multiple computers has any affect on this so I should not have brought that up at all. I thought it might have something to do with it.

Say you just had one computer, the date was set wrong, you added some citations, realized the error, corrected the clock, and then added more citations (although I don't think this step is necessary).

How would you correct the wrong dates? Correcting the current clock does not shift anything in the date added for citations.

dstillman · April 13, 2010

Fix it in an SQLite client if you want. (I think there are GUI ones that are more or less like editing a spreadsheet.) Make sure Firefox is closed, and make a backup of your Zotero database. There's no good way to do it in the UI, just like there's no way to manually set the creation date of a file on most OSes (without using a command-line tool).

ajlyon · April 13, 2010

Rintze's and my comments should be read together-- you can set your clock backwards to the desired date, then duplicate the items. Dan's choice is more robust, but it's also somewhat more difficult and risky.