Zotero strategy for copying items between libraries

If an item is changed in a group library (say, citation information has been corrected) and I want to copy the item into my library so the item in my library has the corrected information, a natural workflow is: delete the item in my library, then drag-and-drop the item from the group library to my library.

But, instead of the corrected item being copied, the deleted item, with the wrong information, is simply restored from my trash folder. The same occurs when moving items from my library to a group library.

Dan has said: "Zotero doesn't re-copy items that are already in the target library and will instead add the existing item to the target collection, so the existing item in the target library would be added to that collection." (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/306639) I strongly suspect that this explains the unresolved problem in that thread, and I lost a bunch of editing work done in group libraries before I realized what was happening.

I imagine the existing strategy is to avoid unnecessary work for Zotero, but it's actually a significant minus for group workflow. I'd like to keep things in my trash folder, but with my current workflow (involving frequent copying between libraries), I can't do that. It forces the inefficiency of having to check and empty my trash every time I want to copy things between my library and group libraries, and/or to manually compare citation data between items.

Is there any other big reason to not re-copy items in the trash? Can this be changed, or is there any change planned? I'd much rather have the computer recopy something than me having to spend significant time manually comparing items. Thanks!
  • Yes, restoring from the trash obviously isn't desirable, and we're fixing this for an upcoming version.
  • Dan, can you describe the "fix". Maintaining even a semblance of similarity between my personal and group library is the number one time sink for me currently. And I still fail miserably.

    realtime99 work flow is to completely delete an item and copy over the latest version, but doesn't that then break the connection from any document where that deleted item was cited? I wish we could select an item and say "update instances across all libraries."
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