Unknown items in library

vkbear68
This started suddenly with Zotero 6 (latest version). Last time I used it all was fine. Opened again and it sat there with the "loading items" window. Upgraded to v7 Beta 64 bit and found out why - the library suddenly had 58656 items, many not in English it seems (I only have 184 at last count).

I tried to delete then empty trash but they seemed to stay in the trash. Zotero restored from backup but that only restored the extra items again. Suggestions (other than delete everything)??

Sync is turned off at present while I try and work this out. Data is stored on local PC not cloud. Running Win 10 64 bit. PC has only ever been used on private networks, no public ones. Zotero has worked without this issue for over a year now.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited April 20, 2024
    The account you're posting from has about 1,500 top-level items, 1364 of which were created on April 13. I'm guessing those are some of the ones you're talking about, but there aren't 10s of thousands more, so if you're seeing 58K locally, these items are coming from your computer, not our servers, and I assume you interrupted the sync while it was still uploading.

    Is this a work machine? Are you connecting to some sort of terminal server, where multiple people can be logged in to the same server in different accounts? If so, someone using Zotero in another account on that server likely saved items to your library by mistake. Otherwise, it likely would've had to have been your opening a RIS/BibTeX/etc. file and telling Zotero to import it. One way or another, if you really mean 58K, the items are coming from your computer.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    But in any case, if any Empty Trash isn't working, you should be able to delete the items from the trash in batches.
  • vkbear68
    Those would be the entries. Personal laptop, only user, on a private wifi network. If BibTex is used I will usually download the file from one of the libraries or sources such as EBSCOHOST and import, or preferably copy to clipboard and import, but nothing has been added around the date of those extra entries. I think there are some duplicates in there. The number I quoted was what Zotero was saying was in the library ("58656 items in this view" showing in right hand pane under My Library). I only disabled the sync last night as I kept getting a sync error due to some fields having too many characters (the new entries seem to have some very long names in there.)

    I was hoping there'd be a simple way to filter out all those added entries that didn't involve me going through the library and deleting one group at a time, hoping I didn't accidentally delete one of the legitimate ones. But if that is the only way forward, I'll get to the task at hand.
  • adamsmith
    In case that's not clear -- you can sort by date in the middle column. That should in all likelihood allow you to identify (and delete) large batches incorrectly added at a given time.
    I agree with dstillman that something going wrong with one (or a series of) RIS/BibTeX imports is the most likely issue here, and I'd guess those would have happened at essentially the same time (I could see something like a large RIS file that you double-clicked&imported multiple times or so).

    Generally when you see weird stuff happening on your account, it's worth checking that no odd locations are appearing for your API keys (https://www.zotero.org/settings/keys ), but it sounds highly unlikely that's the issue in your case.
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