duplicated folers and files without reason

mradik

I'm troubleshooting with a user who opened Zotero today and was faced with many of her Collections duplicated in her My Library list. Not all of them were duplicated. At least one was duplicated 4 times. And collections with the same name don't have the same list of records. Individual records are different enough to count as duplicates that need to be merged.

This is a new computer. She synced her library from the cloud at the end of December. It didn't have issues then. She has not used the Web Library to edit sources since then, and she doesn't have it on another device.

We opened in Troubleshooting Mode, no change. She doesn't have any plugins or third-party apps interacting with Zotero.

She has not had Debug Output Logging on. Zotero detects no errors.

Any advice on how to undo this? She's facing de-duplicating most of 5,210 items.

adamsmith

This doesn't sound like a computer/Zotero glitch but rather like an import/export of a library that then gets synced -- that would duplicate collections and possibly in slightly different states if collections were changed after export.

Three ideas for how to deal with this:
1. Sort the entire library by date added. Is there a particular date where a lot of items appear? That would be the import date if my above theory is right and you could just delete all of those.
2. Delete duplicate collections and items, just keeping the best/most complete one.
3. Worst case, use the Zoplicate plugin to merge all duplicates.

mradik

Thanks, adamsmith. I agree, import and syncing error sounds most likely. But she was sure she'd used it looking okay when she first set up and hasn't done anything like that beyond leaving the cloud synced since then. She has used the browser connector to add new items, and may have done that several times without noticing the duplication.

It looked like the only date for lots of added items was the date she synced from the cloud in late December.

I walked her through using the Duplicate Items tool and she was torn between just hitting Merge as fast as possible and worrying about losing useful info out of the non-master versions. And at least one item we saw in two collections did not show up in the Duplicate Items tool. We couldn't spot the reason they weren't caught when we looked at the two versions.

Would Zoplicate catch things the Duplicate Items tool doesn't?

Oh, wait, would syncing from the cloud retain the Date Added the record has from the cloud, or reset it to the time it was added to the desktop library?

dstillman

No, Date Added is when the items were added to Zotero. If there are lots of items with the same Date Added, that's an import. That's why adamsmith is saying to sort by Date Added and delete the entire set.

Zotero absolutely did not do this itself. Syncing just syncs the exact library among devices. If lots of items with the same Date Added came via sync, the import was done on another device.

mradik

Hmm! Okay, I'll let her know. Thanks!