Citations disappearing

jbhenehan

I accidentally deleted all citations yesterday. I was able to recover them by renaming a backup "zotero.sqlite" - per instructions online. Once they returned, they disappeared again and I had to redo that process.

Now the citations have disappeared again. I see all of the folders that I use to organize them in the app, but the actual citations are no longer in the library.

I have a 13.1 MB zotero.sqlite file in my data directory from a couple of minutes ago. There is a zotero.sqlite old of 1.1MB from this morning (the last time I renamed and went through the process).

There is a storage folder with dated subfolders that correspond with the 1.1MB use this morning.

My current data directory is in the default location in my computer.

I last used Zotero this morning and restored the directory AGAIN at that time. I logged in this evening to "check" that my citations were still there and they were gone.

I have renamed the backup file and gone through the "zotero.sqlite.old" process several times. I even deleted and reinstalled the app.

Where are my citations?
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u16478683/kfh4rzr9xeacjcj9o1iv.png

dstillman

You're just syncing the deletions down again, as would happen on any other computer that didn't yet have those deletions you made. You have to take steps to overwrite the server data:

https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#restoring_your_zotero_data_from_a_backup_and_overwriting_synced_changes

Note that a 1 MB zotero.sqlite file is an empty database. You hopefully made backup copies of all files before you started to rename or move them, as our instructions say to do. You'll want to restore from a copy of the 13 MB file.