accidentally deleted notes

aconcisehistory
i attempted to copy and paste some notes out of zotero and hit a wrong button and the notes disappeared. i tried the 'undo' button many times and nothing happened. i tried closing out before syncing and re-opening and the notes did not return. i tried searching the forums but couldn't figure it out. can anyone please help?
  • adamsmith
    they should be in the Zotero trash, which sits at the bottom of your left-hand panel.
  • aconcisehistory
    hi adam, i looked but don't see a trash on the bottom left hand panel. (tried to add a screenshot but i can't?) the left hand panel is just a table of all my citations? (i looked in my trash online here in zotero but it is empty)
  • adamsmith
    it's definitely there -- it's impossible to remove. If you have groups, it will sit above the groups.
    (You can upload screenshots on any free image hosting site -- imgur.com, dropbox.com -- and link to from here).
  • aconcisehistory
    thank you, just signed up for imgur, here is a link to my screenshot, http://imgur.com/L9Fqf3U
  • aconcisehistory
    hi, i got a third panel to display on the left and see the trash you mentioned. it is empty. is there anything else i can do to get the delete note back?
  • adamsmith
    So you deleted the content from multiple notes at once? I thought you had actually deleted the whole note. Content wouldn't be in the trash.

    Is this just from that one note? You can try
    https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#restoring_from_the_last_automatic_backup

    but that's all there is.
  • aconcisehistory
    okay. i tried that, it didn't work. i don't understand why the 'undo' button didn't just bring the content back in the first place. but thanks for trying to help. best wishes.
  • adamsmith
    you had your cursor in the note when you tried to undo, yes? That's the only thing I can think of.
  • aconcisehistory
    yeah.
  • sebastien.cajot
    Something similar happened to one of my notes. I had some text selected in the note and accidentally hit ctrl+v, which replaced the original text with the pasted information. For some reason, I was unable to undo (ctrl-z) and the text was lost.

    I tried repeating this to understand what caused the issue but later attempts worked (I could undo the pasting and recover the previously selected text).

    If this is some bug causing it, it would be worth looking into as losing text in a note could be very problematic.
  • mmoran
    The same thing happened to me. My cursor was within a note. I had selected a large portion of the note to copy. I hit a wrong key, and that portion of the note was gone. I typed CTRL-Z (undo), but it did not undo the deletion. It would be great if CTRL-Z would work within notes to undo a change that had just been made.

    However, I just now tried to re-produce this behavior, and was unable to do so. In other words, CTRL-Z did work and did restore the deleted text. So maybe something else occurred in my previous example.
  • mmoran
    OK, I was, in fact, now able to reproduce this behavior. If I select all of the text, or a portion of the text, within a note, and, instead of typing CTRL-C (to copy it), I mistakenly type CTRL-V (which will paste over the selected text with whatever was in the buffer memory), then, when I type CTRL-Z, the deleted text does not come back. I am using Zotero stand alone, ver. 5.0.35.1.

    There seems to be another discussion thread about this here:
    "Zotero 5.0 Bug: all content of note deleted when backspace + impossible to do Ctrl + Z"
    (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/300298#Comment_300298)
  • dstillman
    I've fixed some issues with undo in the latest Zotero beta. In the first note you loaded in a session in the right-hand pane, or anytime you loaded a note in the standalone note window, if you made a change and then pressed undo once or twice, you could end up with an empty note. (In my testing it was always reversible by then doing redo.) Now it will stop properly at the initial state of the note when you loaded it.

    The fix will be included in 5.0.36 soon.
  • mmoran
    Thanks!
  • obwankanobi
    edited August 7, 2023
    i also have the same issue. I was attempting to copy all text within a standalone note. I selected all notes (Control + A) and when i went to copy, accidentally clicked (control + v) and pasted in other notes within the clipboard history. When i tried to undo (control + z), it failed.

    I am using zotero 7.0.0-beta.28+3a43a98f1


    UPDATE

    I managed to find a fix for this error from https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#restoring_from_the_last_automatic_backup
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