Deleted group libraries

drhardy · February 13, 2020

I may have lost my marbles, but I swear I had a certain group library that is now nowhere to be found. Is there a trail somewhere of deleted groups (trash, archive, history)?

dstillman · February 14, 2020

There's no record of group names. All I can tell you is that you left or deleted a number of groups on January 1, and none since then.

drhardy · February 14, 2020

So if I deleted one I shouldn't have then it just stinks to be me? Darn it!

dstillman · February 14, 2020

If you (or another group member) have a backup of the Zotero data directory from before the deletion (or if you think it happened within the last couple days and it's still in one of the last automatic backups), you could 1) temporarily disable auto-sync, 2) make a copy of your data directory, 3) restore the backup database, and then 4) export the library data to Zotero RDF with files. You'd then need to reimport that into a new library, and any links from citations in word processor documents pointing to the old library would be lost, but you'd at least get the data back.

drhardy · February 14, 2020

I most likely did it around Jan 1 (when, as you noted, I deleted/reorganized stuff). I think last backup was a half year ago, which won't be useful for me. So I think I'm out of luck. Thanks for the ideas, though.