By mistake deleted subcollection - not in trash?

tomka

Hi, I deleted a subcollection of references in mistake. I though I could undo this somehow but contrary to my expectation I did not find the subfolder in the trash... is there a way to restore it or is the colelction lost? Or is it a bug/missing feature? Zotero auto-synced already unfortunatly.

Thanks!

mark

The trash only contains items that are deleted, not collections. (This is because collections are essentially virtual folders.) The items that were in your subcollection will still exist in your library; but you will have to recreate the subcollection and drag the items into it again.

tomka

Thanks for your reply. I understand, but I also think that it would be good to have some sort of undo function for these kidn of cases. Just imagine if there had been hundreds of articles in my subcollection that would need to be reselected from a bibliography of thousands of entries... In my case that's limited to some dozens forntunatly; also the 'unfiled items' folder helps a bit, of course, if the items were not filed anywhere else, but that's also where it gets tricky.

Bionatsci

I concur on the need for an undo function for deleting collections - I live in horror of accidentally deleting a big collection which I've been building up for years (I have several hundred collections with about 50 that I don't believe I could possibly recreate from memory no matter how much time I spent on it). In fact my default response to deleting a key collection would be to revert to a backup - losing a week or so's worth of new items would be far less disruptive to me than losing a big collection.

Rintze

Would it be possible/desirable to show a deleted (sub)collection as greyed out, and offer a right-click menu option to restore it? Obviously these deleted collections would have to be completely removed at some point (maybe whenever Firefox is restarted, or when a new item is added or another collection is deleted?).

dstillman

If anything, I think deleted collections would just go to the trash.

Rintze

+1 for that, then.

tomka

I agree, deleted collections could just go to the trash. In fact that's where I expected to find mine in the very beginning... I think the folder structure resembles windows explorer in some ways and there a deleted folder would go to trash too. Thus this would be the most intuitive solution, I suppose.