Zotero not reading the database file

lsobottka

My Zotero icon disappeared after a Firefox update. I reinstalled Zotero but my library is now gone. I brought my laptop to my workplace IT department and they found three files on the computer named zotero.sqlite, 00zotero.sqlite, and zotero.sqlite.bak. Each file says its size is 948 kb. IT set each one as Zotero's data directory in turn, but nothing shows up in my Zotero library no matter which file Zotero is pointing to. Yet it seems like there must be something in there (948 kb!) Anyone have experience with this?

aurimas

948kb is somewhere in the vicinity of an empty database, so those are not the .sqlite files from your old database. If you updated Firefox via Firefox's update feature, rather than uninstalling and reinstalling firefox, your old firefox profile should still be present somewhere on the computer (though I would imagine the IT people would have been able to find it, but you never know).

You say you reinstalled Zotero. Were all of your addons gone after Firefox update?

Search your entire computer for a "zotero.sqlite" file.

Also, you wouldn't have been syncing with zotero servers, would you?

lsobottka

Hi, Yes, Firefox self-updated, I did not uninstall and reinstall it. All of my add-ons were indeed gone after the Firefox update.

Unfortunately I had not synced with the servers from my laptop for a long while - long story, the laptop was not working for a long time and meanwhile I collected a bunch of new citations using a different computer and have been syncing that. I'd love to recover the old citations from the laptop though. My IT peeps are definitely on top of the profiles thing...

adamsmith

I can only re-iterate what Aurimas said - it sounds like the three zotero.sqlite versions that you have are all empty databases - to give you a sense: An sqlite database with ~2000 items is about 100MB large (I believe that's roughly proportional, so 200 items would be ~20MB).
When Zotero can't open a database it throws an error and doesn't just show an empty database.

The best advice we can give you is to look for the old zotero.sqlite which should be somewhere with the rest of your old Firefox profile. Or maybe you have a back-up from some time back?

aurimas

You can try following instructions at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox#Finding_the_profile_folder and see if you can find some extra firefox profiles. A whole computer search (looking in hidden and system directories) should pick these up though.

If there's nothing there and you did not have a custom profile directory set up in either firefox or Zotero, then I would say that your old Zotero database got deleted during the update.

At this point, the chances of recovery are very low, but you can try scanning your disk with something like Recuva (if you're on Windows) or some other file recovery software and see if you can find a zotero.sqlite or zotero.sqlite.bak file.