help! zotero has destroyed my entire Dissertation
Zotero has destroyed my dissertation by crashing, switching or deleting footnotes and glitching. I defend in a month and am having a very difficult time trying to refind all the citations. I do not know what to do at this point. Anytime I try and add page numbers to a footnote the whole thing glitches crashes and randomly replaces the footnote with another one. I only downloaded it because a committee member recommended it and now I am screwed.
First, what exactly do you mean "crashing"?
What citation style?
If you're having a problem in a specific document, see Debugging Broken Documents for various things you'll need to try, including breaking the document up into smaller pieces and seeing if the problems occur there. As long as Zotero works properly in a new, empty document, this is definitely fixable.
Finally https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/debugging_broken_documents might be helpful.
https://superuser.com/questions/1042198/ms-word-footnotes-skip-numbers-when-using-track-changes
As for That sounds like it may just be https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/word_field_codes
To add a work that isn't cited in the text, you'd use the edit bibliography function, but you'd still need a Zotero item for said work.
If you do want to keep using Zotero, see https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/debugging_broken_documents and fix citation insertion and we can take it from there.
For adding items for which adding by browser fails see
https://www.zotero.org/support/getting_stuff_into_your_library#manually_adding_items
As a general rule, Zotero works best if you don't try to manually edit its outputs in the Word document until unless absolultely necessary and then only after unlinking citations.