a bad experience with syncing which maybe I can avoid next time

etienneengineering

I work in 3 different places and have 3 different computers. So I´m using Zotero upgraded storage. And I use mostly the standalone version on all 3 computers.

Last time I worked from my office at school on the standalone version, for some reason my modifications where not updated on to the Zotero server. I found out when I opened Zotero from home.

So today I came back to school to try to fix it. When I opened Zotero standalone I saw that apparently my last changes had been saved. But the auto-sync function was on and it started to sync with the server version which did not contained the modifications I was looking for. It took me maybe 2 seconds to go into preferences and tick off "auto sync", but during that time my local version was already synced with the server version, hence losing the modifications I wanted to bring to the server version.

I found the back up storage in my local zotero folder and tried to switch the sqlite file with the sqlite.bak file but the sqlite.bak did not contain all the modifications I wanted to implement.

So:
>> somehow there should be a way to switch off autosync before it triggers automatically?
>> what should I do to avoid such problem next time? Use Zotero on firefox across my 3 computers, make sure to sync every time I am done working, and do a manual back up by copying the Zotero local folder after any major change?
>> or maybe there is a way I can still fix it?

Thanks for your consideration and all the best!
Etienne

Gracile

But, in the meantime - i.e. after your unsynced change - you had modified the *same* item/file (and synced this change to the server) from one your other computer (i.e. not from your office), right?

adamsmith

What you describe doesn't really make sense given the way sync works, so something else must have happened:
1) if, as Gracile suggests, you modified the same item in two places, you would have gotten a sync conflict with an option to pick the one you wanted.
2) if you modified different items or added items, the sync server would always add those changes, never revert them.

Or, in other words, the only time sync will ever remove anything from Zotero is when you have specifically deleted it on one computer.

If you describe in a little more detail what happened, we can maybe make more sense of what occurred.

fbennett

Etienne: To be safe, check the time and time zone settings on each of your computers. If one system is significantly "ahead" the others (i.e. incorrectly set to a later time), it can result in silent loss of changes made on one of the other systems.

dstillman

fbennett: Is there a specific bug that you're referring to? We don't use timestamps when determining what to overwrite. (I believe we use them when determining which version of an item to pre-select in the conflict resolution window if there's a conflict, but the choice is still up to the user. Zotero certainly shouldn't overwrite data just because one computer's clock is different.)

fbennett

Etienne: Please ignore my comment two posts up. This is probably not relevant in your environment.

Dan: Hmm. Disqualifying my comment above, then. We did see records modified without warning, on a group maintained by multiple machines, one of which had a bad clock time. However (a very important however) the clients used were MLZ, and now that you mention it, the reversion may have been limited to multilingual records. The change-markup for multilingual records has since been tightened up, so possibly this is no longer an issue even for us. Sorry if this caused confusion.

etienneengineering

Thanks for all your comments.
It happened like @Gracile described: I modified my library on another computer. But I did not get any sync conflict message as @adamsmith described.