Zotero randomly deletes my entries

gjezequel1 · 2025-03-27T09:49:40+00:00

Hi Zotero community,

Zotero has been driving me crazy for the past weeks. It is constantly deleting a bunch of my entries. At first I thought that maybe I was deleting them by mistake, but it started to be a lot and I was paying more attention. I have one specific folder with my own papers, yesterday they were still all there and this morning only four of them are left. I had a look on the forum and saw it happened to other people but I didn't find an answer. My Zotero folder is located on my local hard drive C:/
The only thing I've changed in the past months is that I stopped the automated syncing to work only locally.

I would be super grateful in anyone has insights about this, I'm in the process of writing grants and I'm losing so much time finding again the papers and re-adding them to my library.

Cheers,
Gwen

dstillman · 2025-03-27T09:53:24+00:00

Can you provide a Report ID?

gjezequel1 · 2025-03-27T09:57:09+00:00

Hi,

Thanks for your quick reply, I just did and here's the ID: 1827512841

dstillman · 2025-03-27T10:18:41+00:00

We're not aware of any reason items would be deleted other than through manual actions — i.e., moving items to the trash and then emptying the trash.

If the items were there yesterday, you should be able to restore them from one of your automatic backups.

gjezequel1 · 2025-03-27T10:28:14+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to answer. I understand that but it's been a few weeks now that I've been paying careful attention to make sure the problem wasn't coming from me, and for sure I did not trash anything from that folder with my own papers.

Yes I'll use the backup to restore yesterday's version but the problem is that if I do that regularly I'll also lose the paper I added in between and it's a lot of time again. I'll see if I can find another solution.

In any case, thank you for taking the time to answer (and thanks to the developers for Zotero in general, overall it's an amazing software!)

dstillman · 2025-03-27T10:48:21+00:00

If you can reproduce this, we'd certainly want to know. Without a more specific report— e.g., a specific thing you were doing when it happened — there's not much we can say.

If you leave auto-sync enabled, we'll also have a clearer picture of when any items were deleted. As is, all we can see is that ~500 item deletions were synced yesterday.

gjezequel1 · 2025-03-27T10:55:07+00:00

Ok thanks. I just restored the back-up from the 25th (the one from the 26th already had some deleted files) and got back all my files (as far as I can see, but at least the ones from my own paper folder). If this happens again in the next days I'll let you know. I will wait to enable the auto-sync again, because I need to deal with something in a shared library I have with my group and this will take a bit of time, but I'll try to do it asap.

Thanks again for your reactivity!