lost library after synchronization

santilli.virginia

I lost all data of my library today after having synchronized my libray. I thought it would save all my data on my library online, but it just erase my library. How can I find again my old library?
By the way, before synchronizing my library i saved my zotero profile in roaming.

dstillman

I'm not entirely clear on what the problem is. You still have hundreds of items online, and no deletions have been made in that library. It looks like the whole library was uploaded today.

What exactly were you trying to do?

santilli.virginia

Hi, thank you for your answer. It is because I solved my problem yesterday evening. I found a back up of the file "storage" in my bin and i reintegrate it in my actual zotero profile. But thank you for looking!

dstillman

What was the original problem, though? How was your library erased?

santilli.virginia

I am not sure. I tried to synchronized thinking it would put all my library stored on my pc into my online library (which was empty before) but then it just deleted all my library on my pc.

dstillman

That certainly shouldn't happen. Zotero should only sync explicit deletions you've made. One possibility: if your Zotero library existed on another computer and you or someone else deleted all the items (e.g., trying to clear out the library on that computer), that could cause all the items to be deleted on all synced devices.

dstillman

It doesn't look like there were any explicit deletions in your case, though.

It seems like this was the first time you ever synced? Did you take any special steps, or did you just set up syncing and click the Sync button?

When you say that it erased your library, what exactly does that mean? What did you see in Zotero while the syncing was happening? I assume you tried restarting Zotero after the items disappeared (in case this was just a display issue)?