Lost my online library

cdjung1
Hello,

I'm new to Zotero and having scoured the forums couldn't find an answer to my problem. I just spent the last four hours adding research references to my collection through the Firefox Zotero application. When I opened up the standalone version on my Mac a sync occurred and all of the references I had added on Firefox disappeared. I am wondering why this happened, whether I can retrieve my research, and what I need to do to prevent this from happening again.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Chris
  • cdjung1
    Just after posting I found an article that resolved my issue. Go figure.
  • Graham_MTM
    could you link to the article for posterity please? I am having a similar problem
  • aurimas
    Where are your references missing from? Are you looking at Zotero Standalone, Zotero pane in Firefox or zotero.org webpage?
  • Graham_MTM
    Well since I figured out my issue, I'll post it here in case anyone else has a similar problem:

    I had zotero standalone installed on a laptop. and the hard drive failed. I was signed in and synced frequently, so I didn't think getting my library back would be an issue

    When i installed zotero standalone on the new hard drive, I signed into my account and initiated a sync. Unfortunately, the version of the library that synced was quite old and missing a great deal of references.

    Luckily, I was able to recover some of the files from the failed hard drive. I copied over the library files from "C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Roaming\Zotero\Profiles\<randomstring>\zotero" and my complete library was restored.

    In the future, I'll make backups of my library file to a cloud storage service, but I'm wondering, what could have gone wrong with the sync process?
  • dstillman
    Possibilities:

    1) Auto-sync wasn't enabled.

    2) You were syncing to a different account.

    3) You were getting a sync error, in which case there would have been a sync error icon to the left of the sync icon, which maybe you didn't notice.
  • aurimas
    It would be hard to tell at this point, but clearly the sync had stopped a while ago on your old hard drive. It could be caused by a number of issues, but almost all of them would have given you some sort of indicator near the sync arrow at the top right of Zotero window.

    Actually, since you simply copy-pasted the zotero directory from your old hard drive, any issue that was causing syncs to fail would have likely carried over (except for passwords, I believe. Those may have to be re-entered). See if the sync is working properly now. If you are having issues syncing, start a new thread please.
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