Upgrade StorageCautionary tale: Nearly deleted 1712 references accumulated and annotated over 7 years!
I recently found myself needing to change back-end WebDAV providers for Zotero client storage. (see https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/107883/webdav-4shared-verification-failed for the entire sordid story.)
The last client I had to change was on my IPhone. I was hurrying through the process and not reading the screen as carefully as I should have and answered Yes to a prompt like "Do you want to delete your Zotero account?". I'm a student on my last undergrad semester with zero financial aid left to repeat any courses, and loss of my Zotero content would have had really dire consequences.
Luckily, I have Group Libraries set up and got a response similar to "You cannot delete your Zotero account if you have group libraries." Thank the GODS! I would have been completely sunk if I had deleted my Zotero account.
Other than telling my story, here's my two objectives for this post.
1) I would urge anyone who depends on Zotero to have at least one group library as a safety from accidental fumble-fingered account deletion.
2a) I'd like to know if there's a way I can do periodic backup in case I do delete my account? I see in my local data directory there is an sqlite database consisting of zotero.sqlite and zotero.sqlite-journal files.
2b) Is there a procedure to rebuild my Zotero content and re-associate it with the right WebDAV files should I accidentally delete my account?
Hopefully,
-KwM-
The last client I had to change was on my IPhone. I was hurrying through the process and not reading the screen as carefully as I should have and answered Yes to a prompt like "Do you want to delete your Zotero account?". I'm a student on my last undergrad semester with zero financial aid left to repeat any courses, and loss of my Zotero content would have had really dire consequences.
Luckily, I have Group Libraries set up and got a response similar to "You cannot delete your Zotero account if you have group libraries." Thank the GODS! I would have been completely sunk if I had deleted my Zotero account.
Other than telling my story, here's my two objectives for this post.
1) I would urge anyone who depends on Zotero to have at least one group library as a safety from accidental fumble-fingered account deletion.
2a) I'd like to know if there's a way I can do periodic backup in case I do delete my account? I see in my local data directory there is an sqlite database consisting of zotero.sqlite and zotero.sqlite-journal files.
2b) Is there a procedure to rebuild my Zotero content and re-associate it with the right WebDAV files should I accidentally delete my account?
Hopefully,
-KwM-
https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#backing_up_your_zotero_data
FWIW: I don't use iOS -- maybe it's easier to get to the delete account screen there? -- but at least without the mobile app, it's pretty much impossible to accidentally even get to the screen to delete your account. So impossible, that while we've had a good number of cases of people deleting their entire local library in various ways, I don't think I've seen a single report here of anyone accidentally deleting their account in the ~10 years since that's possible.
To be clear, though, to do this, you have to tap back to the libraries view, tap the gear icon in the top right, tap Account, tap Delete Account in red at the bottom, log in to the website in the browser that pops up, and then — if you don't own any groups — tap Delete Account again on the page, above the description "Make this account permanently inaccessible? Note that this username will not be usable again."
And if you somehow do all of that when you didn't actually want to delete your account, you could just email us and we could undelete your account and restore your data. Like most large online services, we don't immediately delete your data when you delete your account.
-KwM-