Just upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10

Geminiguy90028
I Just upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and when I opened my Zotero all my citations were gone. Are they lost for good? Is there a way I can retrieve them? I also have Zotero on my laptop. I exported My Library from my laptop onto my flash drive and plug the flash drive into the desktop to retrieve my citations but I can't get the files to import to Zotero. It just opens up the folder and when I click on the yellow folder, nothing happens. When I click on the white folder, nothing happens. How can I get my citations back to my Zotero desktop?
  • dstillman
    Don't use an export. You should find your previous Zotero data directory.

    See Locating Missing Zotero Data.
  • Geminiguy90028
    How do I do that?
  • dstillman
    How do you do what? I provided a link to extensive troubleshooting documentation.
  • Geminiguy90028
    I should mention that I'm working with my offline citations. I am not online.
  • Geminiguy90028
    Oh. I didn't notice the link. Thank you. I will look at it now.
  • Geminiguy90028
    I read the page and still do not see the answer to my problem. Yesterday I saw all my citations in Zotero, today they're gone. I check to see the location where the Zotero files are and they are where they are supposed to be. users/owner/zotero.

    The odd thing is that all my zotero citations is on my laptop zotero, but today when I put the flash drive back into my desktop the citations are all gone and Zotero is empty. The other odd thing is that I didn't log onto Zotero on my desktop and all my data was there yesterday, but today it was all gone.

    I usually just open Zotero without logging on.
  • dstillman
    We can't help you unless you following the instructions we give in full. You haven't done so here, or you'd be providing more information.
  • Geminiguy90028
    After reading the documentation a few times I finally understood what to do. It was more simple than I thought.

    I just had to find the location that Zotero showed the files are located from the files and folders directory that is located in the Advanced tab.

    I then went to my laptop and copied the file to my flash driver.

    I renamed the file and moved it into the Advanced, files and folders location (I had to have Zotero closed to rename it).

    Then I renamed the current citations file so I could rename the citations file I wanted to zotero.sqlite.

    I opened Zotero and all my citations were back. That documentation was very long and had a lot of information that I had to sift through before I found what I needed to do.

    I wrote down the steps here so if anybody has the same problem they can read this instead of going through all that information in the documentation.

    The thing I don't understand is how the sqlite file changed, and the file will all the citations wasn't anywhere in the folder. I'm lucky that I had a copy in my laptop.

    Thank you Dstillman for referring me to that documentation. It was complicated at first but after reading it over and over again it was easy at the end. I'm thinking that whoever writes the solutions for Zotero might have wanted to make people work for the solution. LOL!
  • dstillman
    No, this is a misunderstanding. No documentation says to copy your data from another computer as a way to fix this. While that works if you have all your data elsewhere, the point of the steps I linked to is to figure out what happened to the Zotero database on the computer where it was missing, and the documentation requests specific information if you get to the end without fixing the problem — that's the information you didn't provide that we need in order to help you.

    The section has a lot of information because this isn't a normal thing that happens, and so figuring out why it might have happened takes some work. The documentation page that explains how to transfer your data from another computer is much shorter, but that doesn't help you figure out why this happened and make sure it won't happen again.
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