Group library folders and references lost?

gsjal · December 4, 2016

A group library that I'm a member of lost all folders and references a few days ago. I found a small number of the references (but far from all) in the Trash folder and was able to restore them.

Is this likely to be an operator error, or is a technical error possible?

And whatever the cause, is there a way to retrieve "lost" references?

dstillman · December 4, 2016

This is almost certainly from someone in the group deleting the collections and items. If you email support@zotero.org with the name of the group we might be able to provide more information (or at least tell you when the deletion happened).

If someone in the group has a backup of the Zotero data directory from before the deletion, they could recreate the data from that.

dstillman · December 5, 2016

The items were all deleted on Dec. 1st at 3 a.m. UTC. We don't currently record a username for item deletions, so I can't tell you more than that. But to restore the items you would just need one person in the group who had been syncing and had a backup from before that date.

This does happen occasionally, so we're considering other options for addressing this (limiting delete permissions, offer the ability to restore items, etc.).