Upgrade StorageUrgent help: Lost items inside subcollection – labels/tags disappeared
Hello everyone,
I’m facing a serious issue with my Zotero library and would really appreciate any help or guidance.
I had a Collection containing a Subcollection with 74 articles from a systematic literature review I conducted about a year ago. For each article, I had carefully created two types of labels (tags): one for category and another for region. This classification took me several months of work.
Recently, after opening Zotero Desktop (on my MacBook Pro), I noticed that the Collection and Subcollection still exist, but all the items inside the Subcollection are gone. As a result, I’ve also lost all the associated tags/labels and my entire classification work.
This is particularly urgent because I just received reviewer feedback from a journal requesting a table based on exactly this information (categories and regions).
I’m not sure what caused this issue. Possibilities I’m considering:
*Zotero auto-update (possibly to Zotero 8)
*Sync issues
*Storage limits on the free plan (though I wouldn’t expect older items to be deleted because of this without any notification)
What I’ve checked so far:
*The Subcollection exists but is empty
*I don’t see the items in “My Library”
*I haven’t intentionally deleted anything
*I’m not sure if this could be related to sync conflicts or local database issues
My questions:
*Is there any way to recover these missing items and their tags?
*Could this be related to a failed sync or local database corruption?
*Has anyone experienced something similar after updating Zotero?
This represents months of manual work, so any help or suggestions would mean a lot.
Thank you in advance.
I’m facing a serious issue with my Zotero library and would really appreciate any help or guidance.
I had a Collection containing a Subcollection with 74 articles from a systematic literature review I conducted about a year ago. For each article, I had carefully created two types of labels (tags): one for category and another for region. This classification took me several months of work.
Recently, after opening Zotero Desktop (on my MacBook Pro), I noticed that the Collection and Subcollection still exist, but all the items inside the Subcollection are gone. As a result, I’ve also lost all the associated tags/labels and my entire classification work.
This is particularly urgent because I just received reviewer feedback from a journal requesting a table based on exactly this information (categories and regions).
I’m not sure what caused this issue. Possibilities I’m considering:
*Zotero auto-update (possibly to Zotero 8)
*Sync issues
*Storage limits on the free plan (though I wouldn’t expect older items to be deleted because of this without any notification)
What I’ve checked so far:
*The Subcollection exists but is empty
*I don’t see the items in “My Library”
*I haven’t intentionally deleted anything
*I’m not sure if this could be related to sync conflicts or local database issues
My questions:
*Is there any way to recover these missing items and their tags?
*Could this be related to a failed sync or local database corruption?
*Has anyone experienced something similar after updating Zotero?
This represents months of manual work, so any help or suggestions would mean a lot.
Thank you in advance.
So the possibilities would be 1) it's the items in the trash, 2) you did something to delete items back in December/January, or 3) you added these items on another computer and just haven't yet synced them to this computer.