Restoring Lirabry after sync

ARomanGon

Hi everybody,

I hope you can help me with this. I run Zotero in two different computers, one at my home and one at my office laptop (this is the one with the most recent and updated library). Today I logged into my home computer which sync automatically the account as I had Zotero open in my home PC, I also started my office laptop which caused Zotero library to sync to that one from my home PC (I would assume that Zotero interpreted that my home PC account was the most recent).

This has caused the loss of about 60-70% of my library in my office laptop, which I am not sure it is backed up (at least for a long time). I can see the .bak files which date before the sync but not sure if these files are useful to recover the missing collections.

Can I assume that Zotero has deleted the pdf files from the hard-drive during the sync process? If I still have the PDFs I could still build up the library eventually though this may be a painful process.

Any advice on this would be much appreciated.

All the best in advance,
Alex

dstillman

No, syncing doesn't work this way. Zotero only syncs explicit deletions — it doesn't just decide which side is more recent. If items disappear when you sync, it's because you (or someone else) deleted those items previously on a synced computer.

It looks like you synced a huge number of collection deletions today, but no item deletions, so the items should still exist in your library, though potentially in the trash. I'd guess that you accidentally deleted a top-level collection that contained many other subcollections (from an import, maybe?), but that's just a guess.

On both computers, you should make an immediate backup of all the zotero.sqlite* files in the Zotero data directory before closing Zotero. You can then try restoring from one of the last automatic backups on the computer that was correct most recently.