Zotero may have caused my university student's computer to crash

Marian UNBC

We were teaching a group of university students about Zotero and had them install it. Out of 13 successful installs, one student's computer crashed immediately after. Her computer is working but all of her files are gone from her desktop, where she unfortunately stored most of her personal and student files. We do not know if Zotero is the cause, but if this has happened to anyone else, please let me know. Strange, you can see all the files, but there is no content in them...just ghosted remnants that a file and content was there. This happened on an older MAC Notebook. Needless to say, it was a tearful moment.

bwiernik

There really isn’t any way that installing Zotero could do anything like this. She should take her computer to a computer recovery and repair service.

bwiernik

Actually, I think I know what is going on. If she has an Apple/iCloud account (I would assume she does), iCloud will sync her Documents and Desktop contents to iCloud and save them online only if she is running low on Hard Drive space. It will re-download them when she tries to open them. I would guess that she wasn’t connected to the internet/didn’t have a good connection, which is why they wouldn’t open when she tried.