Upgrade StorageDate modified was modified
After syncing a new machine to my existing account, I find that it has 3199 records (most of which I haven't touch in ages) with a "date modified" of July 1. I see no pattern to the change, and didn't notice it until just now, so I can't generate an error report. I goofed up the settings at first, so I don't think it's a bug. I'd just like to ask how best to fix it without making things worse. The correct data are all preserved on my old machine. Thank you.
Was that new machine actually empty when you first synced it? I don't see a recent full download from your account in the past few days, suggesting that it wasn't. It does look, however, like all of your items were updated on the server in the last couple days, suggesting, maybe, that you did a Restore to Zotero Server? Or tagged all of your items? Or made some other global change? If the new machine had a full copy of your database (copied manually, for example) but all the items on the server were marked as modified, there could be silent conflict resolution that could update some of mod times. That shouldn't happen, but it's possible. I'll look into that. I'd be pretty surprised if this happened syncing to a completely empty account, though.
In the meantime, several of those things are true. The new machine was empty, but I had first tried to move the library over via USB, ironically to save time: I got a lot of long file name errors, so I wiped it and started over with sync. I didn't consider whether the server would remember that. I also did a Restore to Zotero Server on my old machine before starting. (Long and pointless story, but there was an even older third machine that I used very seldom and have now stopped using entirely. Back in winter, it kept introducing ancient edits back into the database, and I wanted to wipe them out. Bad idea, I guess?)
Thinking back, the sync process seemed to hang the browser, but I'm used to that on other machines so I didn't think much of it at the time. Although the Firefox process was still running I had to open a new browser window at the end, but it seemed to have completed, so again I thought nothing of it.
So all that other info makes sense, but the fact that this would happen after a Restore from Server is pretty bizarre. Could you actually go into your Zotero data directory, close Firefox/Zotero, delete zotero.sqlite, and then reopen Zotero (which should be empty) and let it sync again? (It'll just pull down data from the server that way—no need to use the reset options.) If you still get incorrect dates after that, that's certainly a bug, and I can investigate further.
Some of the records I recognize from last time. Thanks again for looking into it.
When pulling down items from the server, Date Modified was being reset locally on all items that had related items. (The good news is that this was only on downloads, so the server timestamps would remain correct as long as Restore to Server wasn't used.)
Previously, the latest 4.0 stable release. I haven't reverted yet; my second attempt gave the same result.