how do I ensure my citations don't unlink...?

Writing-up my PhD and really don't want to have to go through manually and restore all my citations, so I'm seeking your advice.
Right now, everything's fine. Each document has loads of citations, all working fine. However, I've been here before, and my older documents are now just 'dead text'. These are stored on a Onedrive account but that's it - I've never changed the format, never changed any settings, never moved it from one kind of storage to another, etc. And yet I've sporadically had entire documents become dead text, and not been able to find any reason or solution for it on here.
Are there any settings I should be checking right now, or contingencies I should be taking to make sure I don't lose my links? (even backups haven't helped before - it's as if my links have just 'died of old age' after a certain number of months...)
Any tips welcome. Trying to plan in advance this time.
Thanks everyone
  • I don't think we'll be able to tell you much here. Zotero stores data in standard Word fields, and if they're flattened, that's a problem outside of Zotero. If that's happening in a backup file you're not even interacting with, there's some serious problem with your setup that you'll need to resolve.
  • I keep checking this as-I-go, and I've just found some flattened fields in a chapter I've been working on recently.
    Bizarrely, in the same *sentence*, some fields have been flattened and some have not. This is arguably better than losing them all, but means I've had to scroll through the entire document checking which are flattened and which aren't.
    Again, this is a single document I've kept on the same drive and not done anything fancy with.
    I can't find any guidance from Microsoft on this and it's driving me nuts.
  • edited May 20, 2021
    Just for reference, what's your current, full Word version?

    Best I can suggest would be to keep the file off of OneDrive and see if it still happens.
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