I deleted a collection by mistake and it is not in the trash folder!!!

arash2060

Does Zotero save old versions of my collection as Dropbox keeps the old versions of my file? Why isn't my deleted collection in the trash folder?!

aurimas

collections don't go to trash. They're just removed. But removing a collection does not delete the items inside the collection. The items would still be in your library. You would just have to re-add them to the collection after re-creating it.

arash2060

Well! That's just inefficient. Suppose you have a collection of 100 articles!!!

aurimas

Yes, that would suck. You can, of course, restore from a backup. No other solution atm, but perhaps in the future.

arash2060

Fortunately I found out that I had a back up, but it would be as useful to be able to restore collections from trash.

pww2104

I've also encountered this. This is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. It's quite easy to accidentally delete a huge folder (e.g. 'my research') and at the moment there's no way of getting it back except by restoring from a backup.

adamsmith

It does take an action _and_ a confirmation. It's not like you delete collections just by hitting a wrong key.

As Aurimas says, it might get addressed in the future and I understand why that would be convenient, but it is not, in fact, "a serious problem" if we're going by the number of users asking/complaining about it compared to other issues.

And again, collections aren't folders, so you're not actually deleting the items in the folder (or, if you do delete collection and items, those items are in the trash).

pww2104

Using standalone, If I delete a collection, the collection and its contents disappear. It can't be retrieved from the trash folder or by undoing the action. The same if I delete an individual item (and here there's no confirmation either.)

(needless to say this is only intended as constructive feedback)

adamsmith

That's odd, both parts of it. Could you say exactly what you're doing to delete a collection and on which OS and version of Standalone?

And are you positive that items actually get deleted? Have you looked for them in "My Library"? I don't think it's possible to delete items without having them go to trash. At least I'm unable to do that.

pww2104

I've taken another look and realize I was wrong before. When I delete an collection, the items remain in the "unfiled items" collection (which is effectively functioning as the trash). I do think that this is confusing, and it would be convenient if you could just undo the delete action - but the problem's not as serious as I'd thought.

Thanks for your help.

aurimas

It's confusing if you consider Zotero collections as folders (i.e. a Zotero item is stored inside the collection), but not if you look at them as "playlists" (like in iTunes, where an item is assigned to a playlist, but is not stored _in_ it). Then, deleting a collection is simply deleting a list of item references, not the collection of items themselves. This also goes along with assigning items to multiple collections and then editing an item inside one of them (the metadata changes in all collections).

dstillman

And note that their being in Unfiled Items is secondary — the point is that they're still in My Library, which contains all items that aren't in the trash. So saying that "Unfiled Items" is "effectively functioning as the trash" doesn't really make sense. There's no requirement that items be in collections.