Library empty

Brent
Good Day,

My library is not showing up. The library is in a custom path on a new eSATA drive. For some reason the drive 'fell off' of my system (Vista 64 bit) when sitting idle. That's a different problem I'll have to figure out. However, I believe this occurred while Firefox was open and that Zotero lost contact with it's db. This seems to have caused Zotero to re-set it's db...or perhaps it was corrupted.

Though the library path is present now (active and accessible) and the correct path setting is made on the Zotero preferences advanced settings tab, Zotero does not see my library. Instead I see an empty library to which I can add entries normally. This happened over the weekend and renaming the backups have no effect since they are ostensibly backups of an empty db (the sqlite file is 27,115 kb however).

This could also be due to the Firefox 3.5 upgrade that I performed when it asked me to this morning...I lean to the eSATA problem.

I've read the troubleshooting data page, I need some more advice;
Should I do a db repair?
Sync with my online library?

Curiously, no matter which sqlite file is set as the current db (there are 2 .bak files, from 8/17 and 8/14) I can see the freshly added (8/17) entries in the empty db.

Thanks for any help,
Brent
  • Brent
    FYI
    Beta Sync latest available...

    Also, nothing I added this morning (8/17) was synced to my library at Zotero.org...

    These newest entries are located within my custom library path
  • dstillman
    Curiously, no matter which sqlite file is set as the current db (there are 2 .bak files, from 8/17 and 8/14) I can see the freshly added (8/17) entries in the empty db.
    Then you have Zotero set to a different directory (e.g., your 'storage' directory rather than the root directory). Clicking Show Data Directory should put you in the right directory.
  • Brent
    Dan,

    I thought to check this before you replied. I have my path set as follows:
    D:\Reference\Zotero

    Entries added this morning (4) are in amongst all of my other library items in random folders inside:
    D:\Reference\Zotero\Storage

    This seems to be set correctly.

    Brent
  • dstillman
    edited August 17, 2009
    D:\Reference\Zotero
    And that's where Show Data Directory puts you?

    What are you doing to swap in the .bak files?

    Is the firefox.exe process closing completely when you close Firefox? (If it doesn't, swapping files around won't have an effect.)
  • Brent
    Yes. Data directory is "D:\Reference\Zotero" when I press the Show Data Directory button. When I "Show File" (referring to a pdf attachment) it opens a directory in "D:\Reference\Zotero\Storage". This is the correct behavior as I understand it. All of my other library entries are in this directory too, but not visible from Zotero.

    To swap the bak files I simply renamed them. e.g. zotero.sqlite.1.bak to zotero.sqlite

    No Firefox processes open that I can identify.
  • dstillman
    edited August 17, 2009
    Well, not much I can tell you. Zotero reads zotero.sqlite from the data directory when it starts, so whatever file is there will be the one used. If you're seeing 8/17 items after moving an 8/14 database into place, the 8/14 database isn't being read and it's not a question of DB damage. You might try restarting your computer to make sure you're getting a fresh process.

    I assume you already have, but you'll of course want to make a backup of the entire data directory right now and keep it elsewhere before trying anything further.
  • Brent
    Dan, even more puzzling, when I rename the oldest .bak file (from 8/13) to zotero.sqlite, Zotero must upgrade the file (saying it was created from an older version). It then starts up showing only the 4 entries I made this morning... These entries were definitely not there on 8/13.

    I did reboot, finding the same issues, and made a copy of my directory before even beginning this thread. I am really puzzled, but I think I said that already.

    What is my best course of action? Can I just reset to a new library path and sync down from my online library? Db repair is out?
  • dstillman
    It then starts up showing only the 4 entries I made this morning...
    What's the Date Added on those items?
  • Brent
    Added this morning 8/17, they were on open tabs and I didn't want to lose track of them, so I added them even though I could see the library was empty... Kind of as a test...
  • Brent
    Dan,

    This is an Issue of user stupidity. You attention in this matter is much appreciated but I afraid it is caused by having an empty Group library selected, quite inadvertently.

    Quite naturally my library was not visible, but it its there, fully intact...

    My apologies for taking up your time,
    Brent

    FYI Zotero is excellent, thanks for all your efforts.
Sign In or Register to comment.