Upgrade StorageSynced files do not reappear after reinstalling Zotero
Hello everyone,
In a context where group library files were taking too much space on my hard drive, I uninstalled Zotero and deleted the Zotero folder on my C drive. Upon reinstalling Zotero, however, it appears that all of my saved citations and new sub-collections post July 2025 have disappeared: both in Zotero software and in my library online, both in my personal libraries and my group libraries.
I am perplexed because prior to uninstallation, Zotero always acted as if it were synced (the little recycle icon to the upper right hand side of the Zotero interface was still, i.e. not moving, as if everything were in sync).
Have I lost all my data from July onwards ? If not, how can I recover it ?
many thanks,
Alice
In a context where group library files were taking too much space on my hard drive, I uninstalled Zotero and deleted the Zotero folder on my C drive. Upon reinstalling Zotero, however, it appears that all of my saved citations and new sub-collections post July 2025 have disappeared: both in Zotero software and in my library online, both in my personal libraries and my group libraries.
I am perplexed because prior to uninstallation, Zotero always acted as if it were synced (the little recycle icon to the upper right hand side of the Zotero interface was still, i.e. not moving, as if everything were in sync).
Have I lost all my data from July onwards ? If not, how can I recover it ?
many thanks,
Alice
It's possible you had accidentally disabled syncing or you were getting some error that you didn't notice.
Note that we would never advise simply deleting the entire Zotero data folder to save local disk space. If you were sure that all attachment files had been uploaded and were openable in the web library, you could search for large PDFs within the data folder and delete those, but you still wouldn't delete the database. (A future version of Zotero will let you configure how long to keep local copies of uploaded files in order to save local disk space.)
Do you not have a copy of the folder in your recycle bin?
The group library starts with the letter B (for BASIC shared library).
I deleted the storage folder because I could not find another way to free up disk space. Even when I modified my settings from "at sync time" to "as needed" in the parameter "sync attachment files in group libraries using Zotero storage", the already-downloaded files did not delete, and so they ate up too much space on my hard drive. To the best of my knowledge, there was not a small set of documents that ate up disk space -- it was thousands of references with little attachments that just added up.
In terms of backup, I have a backup of my "storage" folder on an external hard drive, with all the folders with the funky names (including my work from June 2025 onwards). That is all I have, though. Nothing else from the old Zotero folder.
Is there a way to reverse-engineer a set of references from the list of folders with the funky names, with or (ideally) *without* transfering the actual files to my hard disk ?
many thanks,
Alice G.
To be clear, are you talking only about items you added, not items added by others? Items have been added continuously to that library since July, but none by you between mid-June and mid-October, so if you added items, you weren't uploading them. Again, you may have disabled syncing by mistake, or you may have missed some error. (Zotero shows a fairly stark warning if syncing is disabled for all libraries.) No, those are just attachment files, not library data. You can do a search in that folder for all PDFs added the last few months and drag those back into Zotero and let it recognize as many as it can, but you wouldn't have any other library data you created if you don't have a proper backup of your Zotero data directory.