One session's data loss

I've lost a couple of hours' worth of edits. I only noticed after closing FF down, as everything had appeared normal whilst editing. But the sqlite files were still dated yesterday. There was no journal file, and FF had closed down normally. Puzzled, I started FF up again, and, sure enough, none of my edits were present.

I've tried and can't get this to happen again, and, obviously as the sqlite.bak file has been written I'm not expecting to get my edits back. But has anyone seen this before, have any ideas re what may have caused it, and have any tips on how to avoid it happening again?
  • A related question: sometimes when I start up firefox, the zotero sqlite file is updated even if I do nothing in zotero at all. At other times, the same situation (running firefox, but not even opening zotero) leaves the sqlite file alone.

    I would have thought the sqlite file would only be updated if edits/additions were made?
  • This certainly shouldn't be possible. There were a few rare circumstances under which edits could be lost in much earlier versions of Zotero, but we put in safeguards about a year ago that made it impossible to lose data in that way.

    If you can reproduce this, we'd certainly want to know how, but unfortunately without more info there's not much we can do. It's possible you've hit upon some bug in the Firefox 2 storage system or perhaps even an OS/filesystem issue.
    A related question: sometimes when I start up firefox, the zotero sqlite file is updated even if I do nothing in zotero at all. At other times, the same situation (running firefox, but not even opening zotero) leaves the sqlite file alone.
    The DB changes you're seeing are due to the daily translator/style updates.
  • OK, thanks Dan. Impossible or not, it did happen (I have a distinct absence of several hours worth of painstakingly thought-out notes to prove it!). Perhaps some freak thing as you say in the filesystem or FF storage.

    I'm going to keep an eye out on the sqlite file to see if I ever get this again (I imagine the obvious symptom would be that during edits the sqlite file wouldn't change, and the journal file wouldn't appear). But given that I have thousands of items, built up using Zotero since the beginning, and have never seen anything like this behaviour before, I guess it's (fortunately) very unlikely.

    Actually given how much I've used zotero, its record for data safety has probably been as good as any piece of software I've been familiar with.
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