Collection disappeared

drhardy

I've used Zotero for a year. I moved to Zotero because I had major issues with Endnote and Mendeley, particularly with stuff disappearing. I just recently had same issue with Zotero. I have several layers/levels of collections in one library. I recently noticed where one second-level collection that had probably two levels within it went blank. The collection folder is still there, just none of the sub-collection or references. Luckily I had a fairly recent backup in another library (I learned my lesson from past) I could use to rebuild it. But, is there any way of figuring out what happened? I am pretty sure it wasn't just user error (accident), since about a half dozen sub-collections disappeared, rather than just one.

dstillman

That would be pretty unusual, and there's not really anything obvious that would cause that. Are you sure you had that collection structure in this library? Note that, if you drag between libraries and then make further changes in one library, those changes wouldn't automatically transfer to the other library.

drhardy

It was fine and where it should be in the backup version. My backup is in My Library. The primary version I'm using is in a Group Library shared with research assistants. We are using this library for fairly extensive coding of 240 articles. So, there are multiple layers/levels. At this point all coding is done, and we are just finalizing and double-checking as we are finishing up the manuscript for resubmission. Nothing like this has happened in the year I've used Zotero. My assistant just emailed me about it last night and I checked it and sure enough that collection was missing all sub-collections. I then went into my backup and dragged them over again. But, the fact that they unexpectedly went missing is troubling. Structure is like so.

Library
Collection
Subcollection Level 1
Subcollection Level 2
Subcollection Level 2
Subcollection Level 2


In this library we have 8 Collections, and each has three Subcollections Level 1, and each of those has numerous Subcollections Level 2. In this case, for this Subcollection Level 1 of interest, all Subcollections Level 2 (I think about six of them) disappeared. The other Subcollections Level 1 under that Collection remained. The references were still in Collection, but no longer in that Subcollection Level 1.

Sveinung

Something similar just happened to me. Very strange.

bwiernik

@Sveinung Please start a new thread and describe in detail what your exact problem is.