System refresh - syncing Better-BibTeX citekeys from old version

aswilson

Hi guys - Unfortunately due to a system error (Mac), I had to perform a hard reset. My Zotero library was synced with online cloud storage service, and I had been through this process (https://raphaelkabo.com/blog/posts/markdown-to-word/) to set up a citation picket etc.

As part of this, I had my library exporting regularly to a synced file.

On my 'new computer' I synced my library from Zotero online. Now I want to recover my old citekeys so that if I work with old portions of text which contain my [@authorname2017] style citekeys, I can still do my pandoc export magic.

However, when I told Zotero to 'import library' and told it to get that from '/file-path-here/library/aw.bib', it pulled in everything from the .bib location and created duplicate items.

Is there anyway to use the online synced version of my library AND merge it with the aw.bib file I have locally?

Thanks
Alistair

bwiernik

You shouldn’t import the Bib file at all. Just set BBT to use the same format of citekeys. It should regenerate the same citekeys as before. For any keys that you pinned by entering them in Extra, those will already be there when you sync.

emilianoeheyns

There's currently not a way to recover the keys, sorry. If @bwiernik 's solution does not work for you, I could look into a one-off to restore them but you'd still have to do some handwork per item. No guarantees though.

When Zotero gets a dedicated citekey field this problem will be solved permanently, but that could still be a way off.