Did you try restarting Firefox?

If you want, you can upload your database to the DB Repair Tool and e-mail the Upload ID to support@zot....org with a link to this thread and a list of the parent items of the affected notes, and we can take a look. Don't post the Upload ID publicly. You can ignore the download link the tool provides for now.

Also, you should make a backup of your Zotero data directory immediately. If the notes really are gone, it may be possible to restore them from an automatic backup.

Thanks!
Yes, the restored notes were still blank.
OK, I see that the upload site requires the entire DB, but my DB is too big to upload (1.68 GB, the last time I checked).

I am going to back up the data directory again, and then do an integrity check.

No, that file by itself is 37,760 KB, but the zotero folder is 1.68 GB. Since I last wrote, though, I found a workaround to get my notes back.

This is what worked: I managed to recover the two childnotes by opening an Acronis backup I made of Zotero two days ago on another machine (let's call that "machine 2") and then copying the html of my two notes (one short one, one long one)onto notepad, and then pasting them into zotero on my main machine ("machine 1").

This was after other failures of trying to recover the notes, though. Two things: (1) I should probably mention that there is something peculiar happening to the trash, though. Also, (2) I thought it may useful to recount what I tried before finding the solution described above.

On machine 2, I tried to export the item and two childnotes using Zotero RDF, but this was successful in recovering only the item and the missing short childnote. The long childnote was somehow not packed in the RDF. This seemed odd to me - was the long note ignored because Zotero only exports the first note, or is it because the note is too long and something timed out?

I exported (RDF) the missing item and notes from machine 2 twice more: (1) the long note all by itself, (2) the item and the long note (minus the short note - I detached it from the item).

None of this worked. (#1) resulted in importing a blank note, and (#2) resulted in just the item (citation), single, no childnotes - blank or otherwise.

Then I found the html solution. (yay!) backing up is good for the soul.

Finally, I went back to machine 1 and looked at the trash again. I was surprised to see that nearly all the blank notes (that previously contained my childnotes, but which, luckily, I no longer desired) had become copies of the short childnote that I had recovered! The identity of the parent item did not matter - they were all copies of the short childnote from the item that had been mistakenly deleted.

There just seem to be some issues with exporting long childnotes, and strangeness in the trash...but I have my notes back now, so I am good for now. thanks for responding yesterday on Thanksgiving!

yes, do upload - follow the instructions on the site Dan links to and zip it first - a 37MB upload is possible, but you'll waste a lot of time&bandwidth waiting for the db to upload if you don't compress it.

I am running 2.1.10 at present.

The childnotes under the second item (Wegman) are indeed still there in the backup DB I uploaded. But the second item's childnotes disappear completely a day later after I tried to fix the lost items from the first item (Alexander), as described in the long post above. The childnotes from second items did not come into contact with the trash in any way. They just disappeared.

Yes, I suspect something happened after I brought childnotes from the first item back from the trash - it seemed to affect other items within the library. I hope Wegman was the only one that was affected.. but I have backups, so all is OK.

looking forward to the 3.0 beta!

No, thanks.