Items missing after restarting computer

dannilamb · July 15, 2015

I've been using a standalone version of Zotero today, having problems with deleting the Trash file (which I posted about earlier) but had given up on that for the time being. I restarted my machine, and nearly 100 items are missing from the collection I've been using. I hadn't synced as I had turned sync off while I was trying to get the Trash to delete, so I can see in my online library that there are 214 items in that collection, but only 116 in the standalone version of the same collection.

Any ideas where these could have gone? I'm rather concerned that this might have happened before without me realising (I've been deduplicating often as I'm importing from various different databases that often have a lot of the same search results, and I've previously attributed different "XXX items in this view" numbers to the duplicates having been cleaned out, but I know that this isn't the case this time). Any help much appreciated.

dstillman · July 15, 2015

If they're missing, you removed them. There's not really any other way for them to be removed from the collection or deleted them. Merging duplicates wouldn't do it, because Zotero adds the merged items back to all collections where any of the items appeared.

Be aware that collections aren't folders, and if you move items in one collection to the trash and delete them from the trash, they'll be removed from any other collection where they appear.

DWL-SDCA · July 15, 2015

Also, look for the "missing" items in your library. It could be that when you were being tidy that you removed the records from a collection but that they remain in your library. I learned this from experience.