Restoring the content of a note

barnareader

Howdy there,

I'm looking for insights regarding an issue I have been struggling with for the past days: I accidentally deleted the content of a note (which happened to be quite lengthy) attached to a given entry. I don't exactly how it happened, but the result is that the note is now sitting empty.

The thing is, I think I have closed the note meanwhile, so that when I have tried to use the undo/redo trick afterwards, it did not work. I have also tried to get the content of the note back from my online Zotero library backup, but it had already been synchronised, i.e. deleted.

Next, I have tried for the past hour to fix the issue with Time Machine backup, restoring the zotero.sqlite file (and actually, the whole Zotero folder) from every single day since the entry was created in my library (October 5, 2017). This has not yielded any result, since the note attached to the entry stays the same -- empty.

Is there any other way I could find the content of that note? Any further tips?

I'm desperate not to read the chapters and write that note anew. (I have even started to doubt that I ever written that note, or the text within that specific note, but I can remember the time it took me…)

The note itself is: https://www.zotero.org/barnareader/items/itemKey/T6JZGE9D/q/sklair

Thanks a bunch,


Antoine

dstillman

Did you temporarily disable auto-sync before trying the backup? If not, Zotero will pull down recent changes (including the empty note) into the older database. You'll want to disable auto-sync, swap in the older DB, copy the note to the clipboard, switch back to the newer DB, and then paste it in there. (It should copy OK, but if not you can also copy from the right-click -> "Source code" view.)

barnareader

Hi dstillman,

Yes, I did disable auto-sync while doing the backup, as was advised in the official documentation. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

Is there any log files that would track all the changes made to the note? So I can locate when it went empty.

Cheers

dstillman

No, sorry. Are you sure you're restoring the file to the correct place? When you start it up and sort by Date Added, do you only see values through that date?

barnareader

Yes, I have restored the Zotero folder into its original place.

I'm not sure what you mean by "values through that date" -- in Zotero?

dstillman

https://www.zotero.org/support/sorting

Sort by Date Added, and make sure you're actually looking at the database you think you're looking at, which can tell because the dates won't be later than the file you're restoring.

barnareader

Yes, this is what I did -- so that the entry I'm struggling with (Sklair 2001) was one of the latest in the list, when sorted by Date added.

dstillman

If the note is empty there, I'm afraid there's probably not a way to recover it. But are you saying you're believe this backup would be from after you wrote the note and before it went empty, or just that you're not sure when that happened?

dstillman

For what it's worth, the note appears to have been created at 15:01 UTC on October 5th and last modified at 16:25 the same day, with no changes since then.