Is my library still there?

tferalio

First time posting so if this gets posted twice, I apologize….

I have been using the Zotero add-in for Firefox for that last few months and it has been great. Unfortunately, I think I may have just made a fatal error. I recently had to generate a new user account and delete the old one on my computer (Windows 7 PC). I assumed that all of my programs would stay intact but it turned out that I had to reinstall the Zotero add-in. I have a feeling that, when I deleted my old user account, I may have blown away my Zotero library because it doesn’t show up in my new installation (both installations used the default file structure). Unfortunately, I did not have the foresight to setup the online backup for my data, therefore, the only hope is that my library is still intact on my hard drive and I just need to link the new installation to it. If there is a good chance that my library is still intact, how do I link it to my new installation? If it is gone forever, is there a way to import the Zotero citations I have saved in the documents I have already written back into Zotero? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Rintze

By default your Zotero library is stored in the profile directory of Firefox, which (also by default) is coupled to a specific (Windows) user account. If the entire user account has been deleted, then yes, you probably lost your Zotero library as well.

See http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#locating_your_zotero_library for more information.

tferalio

Rintze - Thanks for the reply. After looking at the link you sent I did a little searching and thought I should post the results. After looking at the path in the link I went to C:\Users and, since the user account I had deleted was the original account on the machine, it was still there but empty. While in the C:\Users\’profile_name’ folder, if you right click and select ‘properties’ there is a tab called ‘Previous Version’. I selected this tab and found that, apparently, Windows had backed that file up a few times. I was able to scroll through the backups and find the last one prior to deleting the user account. I did not see C:\Users\’profile_name’\AppData in this folder so I assumed it was a hidden folder. To show it, I clicked on ‘Organize’ in the upper left hand corner and ‘Folder and search options’ from the drop down menu. Under the general tab in this window I checked ‘show all files’ and under the ‘view’ tab I selected ‘show hidden files, folders, and drives’ then clicked ‘OK’. ‘AppData’ was then visible and I was able to navigate to C:\Users’profile_name’\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<randomstring>\zotero and restore my library as described under ‘Restoring your unsynced Zotero library from an backup’ in the link you gave me.

Thanks for the help, I appreciate it…

LECA A-M

Hi,
I've deleted files and Zotero was Sync and I don't know why but I can't find my files in the garbage (there are just odl files and I don't know why, too.)
Can someone help me?
Sorry for my english.

dstillman

LECA A-M: Start a new thread and provide more details on the problem.

LECA A-M

In fact it's OK, I find the files in "non classified" .
Thanks