Upgrade StorageRenaming a collection made all entries in that collection disappear without trace
I've just lost an entire day's work of sorting and filing research for a project that's due in a few days. In order to re-structure my library I decided to rename a collection - which had me looking at an entirely blank page to where my files were seconds before.
I'm at a loss for how this could have happened. All the support and info online suggests it couldn't. I checked everywhere, I did not accidentally move or delete that collection. I simply changed it's name by right-clicking on it. Back-up files and Online Synching are no help either.
Where did my collection and its entries go? How can I prevent this from happening in the future? Has anybody else experienced this?
I'm at a loss for how this could have happened. All the support and info online suggests it couldn't. I checked everywhere, I did not accidentally move or delete that collection. I simply changed it's name by right-clicking on it. Back-up files and Online Synching are no help either.
Where did my collection and its entries go? How can I prevent this from happening in the future? Has anybody else experienced this?
Can you provide a Report ID?
Is this for the account you're posting from? Your personal library or a group library?
Do you still see the items in the library root? Nothing has been deleted recently from any of your libraries.
Sadly, I've already restarted Zotero so I don't know if it's any help.
The problem occured in my private library, my group projects don't seem to be affected
Going to "My library" only shows one older entry that I made days ago.
It looks like you've been syncing recently, but nothing else has been uploaded.
If there were local changes that just weren't syncing for some reason, you can try checking your automatic backups to see if you can see any data there. Note the step for making copies of the zotero.sqlite.bak files, which you want to do immediately.
I already located and saved the automatic backups, sadly they are from last night and two days ago, so they don't contain the changes I made today
I didn't manually synch my library before all this so I'm assuming those additions did not register in the online library?
Edit: I did have auto-synching enabled before this, I only just now disabled it so I could load the back-up versions.
Would you mind uploading your local zotero.sqlite file to the DB Repair Tool and providing the Upload ID? You can ignore the download links the tool provides, but the Upload ID would let us run some tests on your database.
Did the items you added have attachments? How many folders do you see within the 'storage' folder of your data directory, and what are the dates?
Do you use similar tools? Other computers? When people report things like this, it does sometimes end up being some sort of confusion, like using another similar reference manager and getting confused about where they actually made the changes.
There just really isn't any code in Zotero that would cause items to be deleted without a trace when renaming a collection, and if you were syncing, it would be very strange for items not to have been uploading as you added them, even if they somehow later disappeared.
Edit: The file I just uploaded is the one I retrieved from yesterdays automatic backup. I now also provided you with the file from right after I noticed the problem earlier today. Heres the Upload-ID for that more recent file: 68065f03986fd
Some of the items I added had PDF-files attached to them, but not all of them.
The data directory is in the default location under C:\users\name\zotero
The storage folder contains 96 files right now, ranging from last November to today in date.
I did not use any other reference managers or devices today to work on this. I'm aware that this should not have happened and I appreciate you trying to look into it still.
Can / Should I keep working on my project while you are looking into my database?
- You created 2 new collections today in your personal library, about 40 minutes before you posted here.
- The 19 items you added throughout the course of today — 15 regular items (3 of them in the trash), 3 child notes, 1 child attachment — are in a group library (M&E). The last of the items was added a minute before you created the 2 new collections in your personal library.
- The items were not modified more than a minute or so after they were created.
- Nothing has been deleted recently, and the items created today have contiguous numeric ids, so there weren't other items that somehow disappeared.
So I think you're just misremembering where you saved the items.