I am missing over a year of entries

kev1807

I've been using Zotero for ages and started to build my literature and sources list with it for my PhD.
I did not use it for two weeks or so and now I'm working on a laptop that I've worked before and I'm missing almost a year of entries.
That really is not ideal. Any ideas what happened and how can I get my research back?

Edit: it's also missing on the server ...

dstillman

This likely just means you created those entries on a computer that hasn't fully synced.

See Changes Not Syncing.

kev1807

it was missing on my main machine as well, but lucky for me, on the main machine, I make regular backups....
For me, this means I cannot trust the software and thus not use it anymore, which is sad, as I am a huge fan of "Open Source" and zotero, but I cannot worry about loosing my data, so my PhD-project was exported and set up in citavi ... (which I have to familiarize myself with, but I'm a computer-guy, so ... )

dstillman

Sorry, but you're mistaken about either what or how this happened.

No items have been deleted in your online library since 2017, so either the items still exist online or they never synced.

In your online library, you have items created every year since 2015. There are only a few items from 2018, so if that's the year you're referring to, and you used Zotero during that period, you created items in a database that wasn't syncing with the server — either because sync was off or because you were getting a sync error in the Zotero toolbar. And if you're not seeing them on your main computer, you're using a different database from the one where you created them. That could happen if, say, you changed your Zotero data directory to an empty directory — or your zotero.sqlite file was otherwise somehow deleted — and then pulled down data from the server, because you'd then have the data available on the server rather than the data you were using previously.

If you want, we can review your backups (or help you do so) to try to figure out what happened, but the items certainly didn't just disappear, nor did any deletions sync to another computer.

dstillman

It does look like you didn't sync between May 2018 and yesterday, so that explains that part. And I'd guess that the handful of items that show up online since then — starting in January 2019 — were created on your laptop, and then uploaded yesterday.

So then the question is just what happened to the database you were using on the computer where you created the missing items. Was that on the main computer? When you went back to the main computer today, did you have a Zotero database there, or did you set up syncing and sync?

If the former, if you look in the 'storage' directory of the original Zotero data directory (before you restored from a backup), do you see folders with timestamps corresponding with your usage over the last year, or do you see a gap between May 2018 and August 2019? What are the names and timestamps of the zotero.sqlite* files?