switching between profiles

katie jones
Hello,
I have two zotero profiles, created accidentally and maintained since there is no way to merge libraries. Let's call them profile_a and profile_b; my everyday use library is profile_b. Recently a collaborator invited profile_a to join a group. I logged out of profile_b, signed into profile_a on my desktop app. Because of storage limitations, my pdfs were all stored locally and not synced online. Now, I cannot find the pdf associated with profile_b, not even in the recycle bin on my computer. Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance!
  • dstillman
    edited May 16, 2023
    Profiles and accounts are different things. It sounds like you mean accounts — and if you switched accounts without uploading all of your files, those would've been deleted.

    When you unlink an account, there's a "Remove my Zotero data from this computer" checkbox, which does it what it says.

    If you don't check that and try to sync with a different account later, there's a warning with another "Remove all data for “[account]” from this computer" checkbox, and it tells you to either make sure you've backed up the local data directory or fully synced with the online library. If you did either, the files would exist in a backup or after switching back to the old account. If you did neither, it's not something we ever had on our servers, so unfortunately there's no way we'd be able to restore it.
  • dstillman
    While it won't help with these files, to avoid future confusion, I'd recommend exporting any data in the first library to Zotero RDF with files and importing into the second library. (Links to citations in existing word processor documents will be lost.) You can then join any groups from the second account that you belonged to in the first account.
  • katie jones
    I made a group folder, then shared with myself, between libraries. It looked like it worked, so I continued with the logout steps. Now at least I still have all my citations, just none of the actual files. le sigh.
  • katie jones
    @dstillman, Is it possible to switch between profiles on the desktop app? It sounds like that all i wanted to do in the first place.
  • dstillman
    edited May 16, 2023
    Again, profiles and accounts are different, so I don't know exactly what you mean. I linked to instructions for profiles, but that's an advanced configuration and not something we recommend or provide support for. You should migrate your data and delete the first account.
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