Zotero library will not open

manish.agrawal
Report ID: 1243621844

I have been using Zotero very happily for a decade now, with almost 3GB of files. For the last few weeks, Zotero will not open my library. It opens with a new library. Steps taken to resolve:

1. The zotero library was on a network drive, I copied the .sqlite file to the local drive, but that did not fix the problem.

2. Uploaded the sqlite file to the fix database tool, no remedy.

3. Tried using Zotero standalone, again no improvement.
  • aurimas
    How big is the .sqlite file you're working with? Since you were using Zotero with Firefox, did you maybe reset Firefox? If so, Firefox would have created a folder on your desktop (something like Old Firefox Profile) with your old Zotero database in it. Were you syncing your database with zotero.org?
  • manish.agrawal
    Firefox was not reset. The sqlite file is 662kB. I was not syncing zotero with zotero.org (haven't done that ever, except maybe once many years ago as part of an exploration of zotero).

    The error was saying something about javascript, though.
  • aurimas
    edited October 24, 2014
    Well, that's an empty database. Are there any other zotero.sqlite.* files in that directory? What are their sizes and modification dates?

    Edit: also, are there any subdirectories in the "storage" directory?
  • manish.agrawal
    The contents of the main zotero folder are shown here:

    http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/Projects/Zotero/sqlite.png

    The contents of the storage folder are at this link:

    http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/Projects/Zotero/storage.png

    There are many subfolders in storage, and a few sqlite files at the top level. The .uploaded file was the .sqlite file. On uploading to the repair tool, it resulted in the 662 KB file.
  • aurimas
    You can see from your sqlite screenshot that most of those sqlite files are for empty databases (anything below ~1MB is an empty database). zotero.sqlite.73.bak contains at least some of your old database (~7MB), but it was created in March 2011, so it's probably quite out of date. You can try restoring that (make a backup copy of your whole data directory first!), but you probably will not be happy with the results.

    I can't tell you how the database got deleted. It's possible that it had something to do with it being on a network drive (that setup is not generally supported). If you have any sort of other backups (whole disk or otherwise), you should try recovering the most recent version of zotero.sqlite that still has a reasonable size (I'm guessing > 10MB).

    On a slightly brighter side, it looks like your storage directory remained untouched, so all of your PDF attachments should still be there. If recovering zotero.sqlite fails, you can at least re-import the PDFs and run retrieve metadata on them.
  • DWL-SDCA
    There is a possibility that your institution makes regular backups of your network drive. It wouldn't hurt to ask.

This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.

Sign In or Register to comment.