Missing library

BCmann

Hello,

I'm using Zotero for the first time, so I did not realize that I needed to sync my library. My laptop has also been acting weirdly lately and deleted everything (my documents, my saved passwords, everything) including the beginning of my library in Zotero. I hadn't been working on it very long, so I started over again, however about a week later everything unexpectedly returned and everything that I had been working on in the meantime disappeared.

In that week I spent a considerable amount of time building a bibliography of about 140 documents and now it's gone. I've spent some time in the forums and have tried restoring from the last automatic backup, but could not find it. I did locate the Zotero files on my computer but neither the zotero.sqlite to zotero.sqlite.old but neither contained the files I was looking for.

dstillman

I'm using Zotero for the first time, so I did not realize that I needed to sync my library.

You don't. Zotero stores all data locally. If something happens to your data directory, of course, the synced data could function as a backup, but your local Zotero data would never just disappear unless something happened on your computer to delete it.

In this case, it sounds like you may have been somehow switching between different data directories. Did you have your data directory in the default location, or did you have it in an external cloud storage folder?

See Locating Missing Zotero Data.