Recovering deleted collections in a group library
I know this topic has been covered several times, but I have a question about recovering accidentally deleted collections from a group library. I have a group library with several hundred members that we use for teaching a course once a year and don't use much in the interim. While preparing to teach next quarter, I realized that someone had (presumably accidentally) deleted a critical set of collections. I have no idea how recent this deletion was or who did it. Given that it may have been months since the deletion, is there any way for me to recover the collections? I know the files themselves are still there but they were in something like 30+ collections that I don't want to remake.
If this just happened, you would be able to restore a deleted collection from one of the automatic backups. If it happened earlier, someone with a backup from before then would have to restore from that. Note the specific instructions for restoring collections.
If you provide the first two letters of the group name, we can tell you when the deletions happened, which might help someone check for an appropriate backup.
An upcoming version of Zotero will make it possible to restore a deleted collection from the trash, but that wouldn't necessarily even help here if this happened months ago, since the trash would auto-empty after 30 days by default. We're thinking about other ways to prevent accidental deletions in group libraries.
A related question on preventing deletions--is there a way to set permissions for different users in a group such that only certain members can delete collections (or files)? If not, that would definitely be a helpful feature in the future.