Do the items still exist in the library root? If so, it's likely that you (or someone else) just accidentally deleted the collection. It looks like five collections were deleted in your group in the last few days.

Hi- thanks for helping us understand this. I set up the group "scienceoutreach" that Joanna is referring to and concur that her collection has disappeared completely despite none of us knowingly deleting it.

Some of the papers in those sub-collections are still in the root directory, now in other sub-collections... it looks like the synch process has become confused when different users have logged on (some of those items, for instance, now contain multiple copies of the same PDF).

Can you direct us to any explanation of how synching prioritizes in groups that have several users?

I'm wondering if we'd be safer having multiple group libraries - and each of us only have write access to one, but read access to all. Perhaps you already have some recommendations of best practice in this regard.

Also - is there a way for me to view the histories you refer to so I can maybe see what's happened?

Thanks

rhiansalmon: No full sync history is available, though you can see who added recent items on the group entry page on zotero.org. (Additional info of this sort is planned.) From internal logs I can tell you that it looks like you deleted 4 of the 5 deleted collections in this group the night of January 27th (Eastern U.S. time). The other collection was deleted by joannagoven on the 29th.

Collections don't end up in the trash, so if a collection has focus and you press Delete and Return (thinking an item has focus), it's possible to delete them accidentally. Hopefully we can offer some form of undo for that at some point.