Recovered a Collection

I accidentally deleted a whole collection, named as Project_2015, this morning. This a large collection and it is very important to my current research.

Would you please help me recover it?

Note: I don't have a backup and I have already synced everywhere. Sad.

Thanks,
  • You have likely not deleted the actual items, only the collection. You can search for the items and add them to a new collection.

    You can also look into your Zotero profile directory (find it in the Advanced tab of Preferences). Do you find a file called zotero.sqlite.bak there? What is its date modified?
  • zotero.sqlite.bak was last modified yesterday. How can I use this file to recover my collection?
    Thanks.
  • @dstillman -- making sure I understand the new Sync Reset correctly: To prevent synced deletions to sync back down to the client in Zotero 5 after a restore from back-up, will the "Reset Data Sync History" work?
  • I recovered my collection using the zotero.sqlite.bak.
    Thank you very much. Your suggestion is very helpful.
  • @dstillman -- making sure I understand the new Sync Reset correctly: To prevent synced deletions to sync back down to the client in Zotero 5 after a restore from back-up, will the "Reset Data Sync History" work?
    No, right now the only way to prevent that is to make a modification to the object to trigger a conflict, and then to choose the local side. In the case of items (including collection membership), that means any field, collection, or tag change (so, say, giving all affected items a tag, or adding them to another temporary collection). These changes can be reverted after — they're just to trigger the conflict.

    (Obviously you shouldn't have to know internal implementation details to recover fro a synced backup, so we'll improve this, but the old "Restore to Zotero Server" was problematic in all sorts of ways, so we're still thinking about how best to do this.)
  • OK thanks (and yes, agreed that this isn't a real solution, but I do want to know what to tell people in the meantime).
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