Retrieving library from a dead laptop

febdon

Hi,
My laptop died over the weekend and my dissertation hand in is two weeks away. My work was saved in Onedrive but it seems I failed to create an account on Zotero so I have lost my library. However, I still have the in cite references in my work and if I click on them and then go to add/edit citation using the plug in on Word Zotero. This obviously brings up the little Zotero window and if I click on the citation in there, a speech bubble appears with the title of the paper and some other information about it. This suggest that they may still be linked in some way.
Is there a way that I can use the in cite reference to get them back into my library?

dstillman

And you don't have any sort of backup of your laptop?

You can use Reference Extractor to extract items from the document back into Zotero, but the extracted items wouldn't actually be linked to the citations in the document, and you wouldn't want to cite those items in this document. That would be useful mainly if you were using the same items for other projects in the future.

For this document, you should just keep citing the items that are already in the document from the Cited section of the search results. The metadata for those citations is embedded in the document and Zotero can continue using it.

If you need to make changes to item metadata for an existing citation, you'd need to re-add the item to your Zotero library and replace all copies of it, choosing the version from your library (rather than Cited) in the search results of the citation dialog.

febdon

No i dont have a backup, my external hard drive got corrupted a while back and i have not got round o replacing it. It's one of those jobs that would have only taken five minutes to do but I kept putting it off.

But any way, I just ran the bibliography list for my document and it has all come up. Thank you soooooo much you have just saved me at least a days work!!!!!!!!

Thank you!!!

bwiernik

What exactly happened with your laptop? It's possible you could pull out the hard drive and pull stuff from it. What sort of laptop is it?

febdon

I have the laptop insured with a maintenance contract, so that is all in hand but i have to send it away and then they will send it back, with or without retrieved data depending the state of the hard drive. But that is long and I have to crack on with my assignment now.