Items disappeared or never synced

jacobeiserman
My regular computer recently froze pretty badly (not fixed, and not sure if it ever will be). I'd entered quite a few items and notes into Zotero Standalone. So I installed the same program on a different computer and logged in to my library online, but no items are listed with modification dates past June 10. I know I added a bunch of items for a good 2 weeks later than that. Did the automatic sync stop working on my old computer without me noticing, or is there a ghost account somewhere with the extra items?
  • dstillman
    Before today, your last upload from this account was on June 11th.

    If auto-sync was failing, you would've been getting an error icon to the left of the sync icon—you may just not have noticed.
  • dstillman
    Note that you have 58 items (including child items) in the online library for this account. You'd have to say whether that's your whole pre–June 11th library.
  • jacobeiserman
    OK, hopefully I can recover my data from the other computer yet. I'll be more careful about auto-syncing in the future. Pretty sure all the pre-June 11 stuff is there though.
  • jacobeiserman
    Installed Standalone on a new machine and got this error message when I tried to sync: 2071541946 (afterwards, the same 25 items did sync over). Is that in any way connected to the items that failed to sync before?
  • dstillman
    There are no sync error in there.
  • mfeldman
    The professor who employs me (I'm posting from her account) is in the same situation as the OP: hard drive failure, no backup of the Zotero library, and a new installation is almost a year out of date after syncing.

    Would you be able to tell me the last sync date on this account, prior to June 25, when she first synced the new installation?
  • dstillman
    mfeldman: The account does not appear to have been synced before June 25th. (For other questions, please start a new thread.)
  • jacobeiserman
    I got my old library with Standalone back, including the items that didn't sync before. Even though I have it set to sync automatically, the server is not updating. How do I sync it manually?
  • dstillman
    http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/changes_not_syncing
  • slmrlln
    I have the same problem: my computer crashed last week, I got a new one and reinstalled Zotero, but none of my changes since February 20, 2013 seem to have synced to the online library. I'm writing my dissertation, for which I use Zotero practically every day, and I sync both automatically and manually. If the sync was failing, I would have noticed. So I was shocked to find nothing synced between February 20 and July 4 or 5. I've lost a lot of data, most of which I did not have backed up because the sync function seemed to be working fine. Is there any way to recover it?
  • adamsmith
    I don't think so, unfortunately.
    You don't have any hard-disk back-up?
    We warn against using sync for back-up for this - among other - reasons.

    Any chance that you have a second account you synced with? That sync would go threw without an error but not actually sync is very, very unlikely.
  • slmrlln
    I stopped backing up my Zotero library a while ago because the sync seemed to work so well. I was aware of the issues related to auto-sync and back-up, but I had no idea that data which seemed to be synced might in fact be lost. Clearly that was a mistake.

    I don't think I have a second account, but I'll check.
  • dstillman
    In your account I see repeated downloads from February 20th through now, all with a last-sync time of February 20th. Presumably those were failing locally for some reason. Since downloads happen before uploads, there are no uploads during that time period. Sorry I don't have better news for you.

    As adamsmith says, it's extremely unlikely that a data sync was failing without an error icon—we've had no other reports of anything like that—but that's about all I can tell you.

    Re: backups, there's really nothing special about Zotero data. If this is your own computer, you should have a full, automated backup of your entire computer. (And specifically, even if Zotero syncing was working perfectly for you, only a set of automated backups would help you recover if you, say, inadvertently deleted a bunch of items and realized too late.)
  • slmrlln
    That makes sense, although I'm still not sure what changed on February 21. My Dropbox sync hasn't had any problems. But it's local and Zotero-specific - that's a place to start. Thank you.
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