Accidedently deleted folders

tanveermunir

I was recently collecting references and i did same mistake to click delete, and viola, all gone.
the deleted individual references can be restored from the "trash" but not whole folders.

So i followed this link,
https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#restoring_from_the_last_automatic_backup and

I restored the references in library but not in form of folder.

qqbb

You could check if this works for you:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/81154/restore-collection

dstillman

First, if you deleted a collection, the items wouldn't be gone — they would still exist in the library root. Only the collection would be gone.

If you just did this very within the last day, you should be able to restore from one of the last automatic backups.

We're still planning to provide a better way to recover from this. Note, though, that deleting a collection requires clicking through a confirmation prompt, so it's not as simple as clicking or pressing one wrong thing by mistake.

tanveermunir

thanks for the hlep... it worked to restore references in library but not as folder.

dstillman

The references would've already been in the library, so you wouldn't have needed to restore those.

Unless you did this more than 24 hours ago, you should definitely be able to restore the collections from the automatic backup. What exactly did you try?

tanveermunir

In Zotero data i made a copy of a zotero.sqlite.bak file with recent time. Closed Zotero and renamed the zotero.sqlite to zotero.sqlite.old, renamed one of the .bak copies you made to zotero.sqlite, and restarted Zotero. I could find the references in zotero library but not in the specified folder.

dstillman

Did you try the other zotero.sqlite* files? Again, the items should've been present in the library root already — you wouldn't have needed to restore from a backup for that. If you know when you deleted the collection, you should be able to tell from the timestamps of the backup files if they would've contained the collection.

But if you're just trying this now, and didn't back up your data directory three days ago, the automatic backups were likely already overwritten with newer copies.