Accidentally deleted a collection

dstillman
This discussion was created from comments split from: Zotero deleted/lost many of my items?.
  • dgati
    Where does Zotero move items that are deleted? The computer's regular Trash folder or is there some Zotero specific folder for this? I think I accidentally deleted a collection and am now trying to restore it somehow. It looks like my library isn't up to date online and I didn't do any backups, I thought the online library was fine.
  • dgati
    P.S. The Zotero trash is empty, and the PC's own Trash folder doesn't contain the collection either...
  • dstillman
    If the trash in Zotero is empty, you likely just deleted a collection without deleting the items within it, so no items would show up in the trash. You can try restoring from the last automatic backup.
  • dgati
    Thanks dstillman (also for the speediness of your response). I looked at the link you provided but I think I have another problem.

    Since I didn't have auto-sync enabled (I thought I had), I figured that the automatic backup procedure involving renaming the .bak files should apply to my case. However, my problem is that since a year or so, I have been using Zotfile, which saves all stored data in a new folder specifically created for this purpose. This means that when I locate my Zotero data, Zotero directs me to this new folder, and the .bak files (as well as all the other files) refer to this folder. However, the collection I was looking at and accidentally deleted predated my use of Zotfile and that data storage folder, and so I'm wondering if those .bak files would even contain the collection?

  • dstillman
    edited November 25, 2018
    The automatic backup is unrelated to syncing and ZotFile. Syncing only comes into play for restoring the backup data to the online library, as explained in the linked page. ZotFile is totally unrelated, since this is about your database, not files.

    The instructions I linked to are what you're looking for. But they'll only help if the backup is from before you deleted the collection, as which you can tell from the timestamps of the .bak files.

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