Is there a way to revert to an earlier sync?

afpnsp2016

We have a team of 3-4 interns working in a Group Library, and after spending a few days carefully reworking our manual tags (with extensive deleting and renaming of tags) to better match our research, all of a sudden some of the old tags have reappeared and some others have disappeared.

We asked around, and it appears that one of our interns had been working remotely on Standalone and not syncing, and then synced the same day that our tag issue started. We instructed him to always use the remote version when there was syncing conflict (and he said that he did so), but our best guess is that somehow the tags were synced with his local version.

Is there anyway to revert our tags to how they were prior to his sync? We have a backup we made before we did the tag consolidation, so I suppose that we could use that as a last resort, but we don't want to have to redo our work if we can avoid it!

Thanks in advance for the help.

adamsmith

For the immediate problem, no, there is no good way to revert to an earlier sync, I'm afraid. For groups, I'm not even sure that restoring from a back-up will work well, since the version on the server is newer.

Generally, it might make sense for you to switch your entire team to the 5.0 beta version. The way 4.0 syncing works, tag conflicts are very likely (edits on the same _tag_ cause them, even if on different items) and Zotero doesn't actually let you resolve the conflicts -- it just errs on the side of not deleting tags. 5.0 is a very mature beta, so any problems you may encounter are likely smaller than the tag syncing issues.

afpnsp2016

Thanks for the reply. One other piece of information that might help: it appears that even though we are using a Group Library, all of our team is using *one* username, so there is only one user in the Group Library.

This was set up before my time on the project, but with that in mind, would that contribute to the problem? Would switching to 5.0 still be advisable?

adamsmith

I don't think the set-up would matter either way, no. And yes, I'd still switch to 5.0

bwiernik

I had the same annoyances with tags in group libraries in Zotero 4.0. I can say that the experience is much better in Zotero 5.