Collections lost after Firefox reboot

Ropes'n'Grebes
I am relatively new to zotero and I had recently accumulated ~100 articles but I had not manually synced them (I'm using plug-in only, not standalone). I was having trouble with Firefox and resorting to using "restore Firefox to original settings"... without thinking first to sync my zotero. My collection is now empty... have I lost everything?
  • RintzeRintze
    edited March 27, 2013
    http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems says 'After the reset is finished, your old Firefox profile information will be placed on your desktop in a folder named "Old Firefox Data."'. Can you find that folder? It should contain your Zotero data. (once you've found it we can explain to you how to restore your data)
  • Ropes'n'Grebes
    Well I feel like an idiot, it was about a week ago that this happened with Firefox and I had deleted that file because I didn't think I needed it. Thank you anyhow for your quick response.
  • RintzeRintze
    You could check if Firefox by any chance also left a copy of the old profile in its original place. See http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data for instructions on how to find your profile folder(s). If there are two (or more), one of them might be the old one.
  • Ropes'n'Grebes
    There is an old folder, but for some reason it only has two of the articles in there.
  • arggem
    Did you empty the recycle bin? Maybe it's still there.
  • Ropes'n'Grebes
    edited March 27, 2013
    Yes unfortunately I emptied the recycle bin. Thank you both, but it looks like I've just got some quality time with Google Scholar ahead of me.
  • RintzeRintze
    There is an old folder, but for some reason it only has two of the articles in there.
    How exactly did you determine that there were only two articles?

    Do you mean PDFs for two of the articles? Item metadata is all stored in a single database file, and only attachments (such as PDFs) are saved separately. If you didn't save PDFs for most of your items, your whole collection might still be intact.
  • Ropes'n'Grebes
    Yes, sorry, I meant there are two PDFs. I did save PDFs for most of my articles. The old folder has only two subfolders, "extensions" and "zotero". The Extensions folder has another subfolder but that is empty, and the Zotero folder has a "storage" subfolder which in turn has two subfolders, each with one PDF.
  • RintzeRintze
    Does the "zotero.sqlite" file in the old folder have a modified date that is about a week ago? (of when you last used Zotero with your old profile)
  • Ropes'n'Grebes
    No, it's modified date is today.
  • RintzeRintze
    You're probably looking at your current profile then, not the old one. Are there multiple folders in "...\Firefox\Profiles\"?
  • Ropes'n'Grebes
    Yes, there are two folders there, and the old one is the one I mentioned earlier that only has "Extensions" and "Zotero" subfolders, with nothing else.
  • RintzeRintze
    I should have clarified that the "zotero.sqlite" should be in the "zotero" subfolder of the profile folder.

    Also, are you sure the "old folder" is the old folder? How did you determine this?
  • Ropes'n'Grebes
    The date modified of the "old" folder is the date I reset Firefox. The "zotero.sqlite" file in the "new" folder has a date modified of today. There are only the two folders in the Profile folder.
  • RintzeRintze
    If there is no "zotero.sqlite" file in the old folder you indeed lost your data (unless you have a backup somewhere else).
  • Ropes'n'Grebes
    That appears to be the case. Thank you for your help though. I will be more careful next time!

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