Lost tags from Personal library

Gurdas_Sandhu

I had copied a couple thousand items from my personal library to a group library where I am the owner. My personal library has six colored tags (and hundreds of other tags). In the group library, only one of these six tags was of use. So, I deleted the remaining five tags from my group library. I also deleted a couple other tags from the group library. I did all of this at my work computer.

Now, at my home computer, I notice the tags I deleted from my group library are also gone from my personal library. Is this possible?

Or, did I just make a user error of deleting the tags from my personal library (all the while assuming I a working in my group library)? I am doubting user error because I certainly did not delete the tags twice and I certainly deleted them after copying the items from personal to group library. So, if I deleted the tags from personal library, they should still be in the group library, but they are not.

If it is a user error, what are my options? I have a full backup of Zotero from Nov 02 (the date on my backed up zotero.sqlite file).

Gurdas_Sandhu

Just checked the online version of my personal library, and it has the "missing" tags. Further, the online version of my group library does not show the deleted tags. As an example, in the online versions, the tag "pending" exists in my personal library but does not exist in the group library. However, "pending" is missing from both personal and group library at my home computer.

Thus, the online version looks fine. And, the question is, what's up with the local library at home computer?

Gurdas_Sandhu

@dstillman When you have a moment, could you please look in to this?

Gurdas_Sandhu

The local library at my work looks fine - for example, there are 563 items tagged with "pending".

dstillman

Is the "pending" completely missing in your personal library at home, or does it just no longer have a color assigned?

Gurdas_Sandhu

At home computer: The "pending" tag shows up in the colored tag list, but it is not selectable. I have an advanced search saved for "pending" and it is empty. Other colored tags with same status as "pending" are: getcitations, reviewed, add2paper, and review pending. A non-colored tag, "citedby", is missing from the tag list.

At work computer: All the colored tags and the citedby tag exist and are selectable.

Basically, for my home computer, the tags that I deleted from the group library are not selectable or missing in the personal library.

dstillman

If you made these changes at work, I can't really think of any way that would happen, given that they're correct online. Tags are properties of items, so removing them from the work items would really just transfer those items and have no effect on the items in the home library. Obviously, if you see anything like this again, let us know.

To recover, the easiest thing to do is to add an additional temporary tag to all of the affected items at work, which will cause them to be updated and sync up to your online library, along with the original tags. (Make a backup of your work data directory first just to be safe.)

dstillman

(And the easiest way to assign the temporary tag is to make it a colored tag. If you don't have room for that, you can also do this with the Display All Tags in This Library option in the tag selector.)

Gurdas_Sandhu

Thanks. I guess you are saying colored tag is easy because I can select all affected items and hit the number corresponding to the temporary colored tag, right?

Can I just add the temporary colored tag to ALL items in my personal library, rather than just the affected ones? That will save me some time.

dstillman

I guess you are saying colored tag is easy because I can select all affected items and hit the number corresponding to the temporary colored tag, right?

Right.

Can I just add the temporary colored tag to ALL items in my personal library, rather than just the affected ones?

You can, but then all your items will need to reupload instead of just the affected ones. This should be very quick — you just need to click on "pending", Select All, and press the number of the temporary tag, and you're done.

Gurdas_Sandhu

@dstillman This happened again at my work computer. I drag-dropped about 20 items from Personal Library to Group Library. Some of these had the "pending" colored tag (#1). In Group Library, I deleted the "pending" tag. Now, the "pending" tag is unclickable in my Personal Library, too. Just as last time, the "pending" tag is showing correctly in the online version of my Personal Library and there are 576 items with this tag.

Also, in Personal Library, if I hit "1" I can't get an item to be assigned the "pending" tag. Which would be the expected behavior if the "pending" tag is not assigned to any items (in other words, does not exist), right?

My work computer has Zotero 5.0.32 on Windows 10 Enterprise 64-bit.

Gurdas_Sandhu

The "pending" tag appears fine at my home computer personal library. So, basically the tags disappears from all items in my personal library when I delete it from all items in my group library, and this happens only on the computer where I did the deletion. Even with sync working fine, the tag does NOT disappear from the personal library online or on another computer.

dstillman

So, basically the tags disappears from all items in my personal library when I delete it from all items in my group library

OK, that I can reproduce. Sorry about that. Fixed in the latest 5.0 Beta, and we'll put out a 5.0.34 soon with this fix.

Gurdas_Sandhu

Thanks, @dstillman.