Notes are mangled/lost!

funkydan2

Hi,

I'm not exactly sure what has happened but I've just lost a bunch of notes which I have been taking for a book.

What's occurred is that I've read both a book + a review of that book.

I read the book first, and had three 'notes' for that book.
Then I read the review, and wrote one 'note' for the review.

However, now all of these notes contain exactly the same text/words. That is, the notes I took on the review now show up in all the other notes.

I've restarted firefox, and have checked my online data - it's the same everywhere.

Is there any way to find the old notes which I have taken?

I'm using Zotero 2.1.6, inside FF4 on a Mac.

dstillman

We can take a look, but first, before you do anything else, see if there's an automatic backup from before you noticed this and make a copy of it.

funkydan2

Hi Dan,

I'll look into this when I get back to my desk in the morning.

My only concern is that I've restarted firefox, and my computer, since this has happened since I was hoping that it was some cached data that had got 'stuck' and that a restart would fix it!

Daniel

funkydan2

Ok, so something funny happened here.

I restored the last automatic backup as you said and when I did that some of my notes came back (obviously the ones that had been written before the backup) so I was very glad.

However, I went and 'clicked around' a bit, just checking what was still in my library, and then when I went back to the notes that had previously been corrupted/duplicated, they were corrupted again! (I'm not sure if zotero syncronised with my online account during this time, which might have caused this to happen.)

Daniel

dstillman

(I'm not sure if zotero syncronised with my online account during this time, which might have caused this to happen.)

It's easy enough to tell—just turn off auto-sync temporarily in the Sync pane of the Zotero preferences.

funkydan2

Hi Dan,

Yes, thanks for the suggestion re: turning off the auto sync. However, it has synced and my notes have been lost. However, I'm pretty sure now that any of my backups no longer have the data that I was wanting to recover.

I've now re-read the relevant sections of the book where I lost the notes, so I'm more interested now in somehow helping get this bug squashed. (The downside of this event is that I no longer have confidence in Zotero for taking notes as I read, and I was really enjoying the new editor interface.)

Daniel

fbennett

It doesn't give me much pleasure to say so, but this might have been caused by flaws in the code of citeproc-js. The version of the processor running in Zotero 2.1.6 contains a number of bad variables (undeclared global variable assignments, in Javacript-speak).

The current release of the processor, to be featured in the next Zotero release, is clean in this respect. Dan will be able to say whether global variable assignments were a possible cause of the accident with your notes (I can provide a list of the variable names affected, if needed). In any case, a Zotero release with the updated processor code is surely coming soon.

dstillman

However, it has synced and my notes have been lost. However, I'm pretty sure now that any of my backups no longer have the data that I was wanting to recover.

I'm not totally sure what you mean by this. As in, your backups didn't in fact have the notes you were trying to recover, or you didn't make backup copies of your backups once you discovered that they did?

In any case, I should've mentioned above that the notes in your backup would indeed be overwritten by a sync unless you modified them locally to trigger the conflict resolution window. But once you had the backups, there's no reason you should've lost that data...

I'm more interested now in somehow helping get this bug squashed

Are you able to reproduce it? No one else has reported this, so we don't have any reason to suspect this is a widespread issue and probably won't be able to debug it otherwise.

dstillman

It doesn't give me much pleasure to say so, but this might have been caused by flaws in the code of citeproc-js.

Frank: I'm not sure how global variables in the citation processor would cause this, given that the citation processor isn't (I don't think) called in any way during note editing. Is there a reason you think this is the case?

fbennett

I was thinking that a loop variable might get clobbered during sync.

dstillman

It's not clear that this happened during a sync. The sync above was likely just pulling down data that had already been altered since the last backup.

But I don't think citeproc-js would be called during note editing or during syncing, so I wouldn't assume that that was the cause. (Certainly there shouldn't be global variables, though.) Really, I suspect we're not going to know how this happened unless Daniel or someone else can reproduce it.

Also, Daniel, if the notes in question are still in the online library, e-mail their URLs to support@zot....org with a link to this thread and we'll take a look. If you've already corrected them, don't worry about it.

jano_riha

Good afternoon,

I have come across this thread as I was experiencing similar difficulties with notes intermingling (more precisely with impossibility to take more than one note, as all the notes were somehow overwritten by the last taken note). So far it seems that restarting Firefox helped to solve the problem (I am using 4.0.1 version on Win XP SP2). At least for any note taken from now on. I will let you know in case the problem appeared again.

Many thanks and best wishes to the Zotero team
Jano Riha

mgouvea

Hello,

I also am experiencing the same problem. What tends to happen is that I will click on one note (A), then switch to a different note (B) on another work--only to find note (B) has been overwritten to look identical to note A.

In case it helps, I should also note there is something similar going on when I add a new item. I will add a book, and in the central window it will have the correct symbol and a blank line. However, in the detailed record on the right, it will be filled in with the details from the last item I looked at. (This extends to changing the item's identification to a journal article if the last item I clicked on was a journal article.) If I click to and from it will sometimes correct itself and go blank, but if I click on any part of the form the rest of it locks in, an identical copy to last record I looked at.

I would love some input on this, as it rather disconcerting to click on a note you need only to see it disappear...

Thanks,

---Marcos G