Lost entire subcollection with references, report id 696523855

hazybluedot · July 3, 2017

At some point today, possibly related to a "updating from sync server" event, I seem to have lost an entire sub-collection along with the items contained within. Going from a recently exported .bib file, the items I have searched for so far no longer exist in my library.

I generated a report after checking different clients to confirm that the subcollection had vanished from the universe, so I don't know how useful the information in the report will be.

Report ID: 696523855

Is there a way to see a log of sub-collection creation and removal to figure out why this sub-collection disappeared?

Is there an easier way to restore the lost items than going through the .bib file one by one and searching for and downloading them again?

dstillman · July 3, 2017

In your personal library, it looks one collection (not including items) was deleted today, and two items were deleted a couple hours before that. Another item was deleted yesterday. Before that nothing was deleted since May. So a collection of items definitely wasn't deleted today in your main library.

Note that it's pretty much impossible for collections or items to be deleted on their own — all sync activities always err on the side of keeping data.

It does look like there was a full sync for your account today. One possibility is that you only had those items on one computer and they hadn't synced because of some sync error, and then your Zotero was somehow reset to another data directory, causing it to pull down all the data from the server (which wouldn't include those items). You can probably tell if that's the case by looking in your Zotero data directory for the timestamps of the directories in the 'storage' directory as well as for timestamps of any zotero.sqlite files in the root. If that appears to be a new directory, you would want to look for another data directory elsewhere on your computer.

hazybluedot · July 4, 2017

Thank you. That information has helped me at least know how to restore my files.
The storage directory did appear to have been created just yesterday, but I could not find another one. I tried restoring the zotero directory from a backup made on July 2. When I first started Zotero after restoring the backup I saw the missing collection and files, but shortly after Zotero initiated what looked like a full sync from the server and the files disappeared. I filed a report immediately after

Report ID: 1183376776

dstillman · July 4, 2017

The storage directory did appear to have been created just yesterday

Meaning all the folders within 'storage' were from yesterday, and there were no older zotero.sqlite.* files in the root directory?

When I first started Zotero after restoring the backup I saw the missing collection and files, but shortly after Zotero initiated what looked like a full sync from the server and the files disappeared.

These two things don't really square with the above. If you're talking about your personal library, only one collection (not counting items) and a few items are actually in the delete log since May on the server, so that's all that could sync down and be deleted locally. There's no way for more than three items deleted since May to have disappeared. So either 1) this is a new data directory and you had many items that hadn't synced up in another data directory elsewhere or 2) this is the same directory you've been using and you accidentally deleted a collection but most of its items can still be found in the library root. I'm guessing it's just the latter.

Now, though, it looks like you may have done a Restore to Zotero Server anyway?

hazybluedot · July 4, 2017

> Meaning all the folders within 'storage' were from yesterday, and there were no
> older zotero.sqlite.* files in the root directory

Actually, no, it looks like not all of the directories within storage were created yesterday, many were older.

> 2) this is the same directory you've been using and you accidentally deleted a
> collection but most of its items can still be found in the library root. I'm
> guessing it's just the latter.

I agree, this seems to be the most likely explanation, but I was unable to locate any of the items I could recall from memory that were in the missing subcollection.

> Now, though, it looks like you may have done a Restore to Zotero Server anyway?

Yes, that seemed to be the easiest way to "fix" whatever it was that happened. I restored from a backup and did a reset to the Zotero Server with that.