Zotero 7: Annotations cannot be recovered once item is trashed

linn.a · August 2, 2024

I just moved an item to trash. When I tried to restore it, the annotations were gone.

Is this the intended behaviour?

The item in question is an ebook. The reason for trashing the file is that I wanted to fix the filename "Ebook" that was introduced due to an earlier bug. I wanted to relink the file. But since the attachement is not missing, I cannot use the locate option shown in zotero

dstillman · August 3, 2024

Not exactly sure what you mean here. Can you explain exactly what you did, step by step?

Annotations belong to attachments, and if you delete an attachment and restore it from the trash, the annotations should certainly still be there. (They're there and viewable even while the attachment is in the trash.)

linn.a · August 3, 2024

Ok. I had an item (parent item with a ebook attachment) that had the issue of filename being changed to Ebook. I installed the latest beta version of zotero because I saw in github you were fixing those issues.

However since the Ebook file is already present I could not re-add it. So I thought I will delete the attachment and re-add the same file (with the hope that it would not be renamed to "Ebook")

The item had some highlight annotations in it. But after deleting and then restoring from trash. Those disappeared.
I cannot reproduce it now. That is it doesn't happen with a new file that I added. But maybe it might happen with the old ones.

Anyway is there a way to safely re-add or re-link an attachment without first trashing it?

dstillman · August 3, 2024

Again, the "filename" wasn't changed to "Ebook" — that's the attachment title. And if you didn't want that, you could've just changed the attachment title from the item pane.

In any case, I still don't understand what you did. Are you saying you moved the attachment to the trash and then realized you didn't want to do that, and so you restored it? Or were you actually trying to accomplish something by moving it to the trash and back? (That wouldn't do anything at all — including doing anything to annotations.) Or do you mean that you moved something to the trash and then added the same file to the parent item? Because that would be a totally separate attachment that wouldn't have the previous annotations.

Anyway is there a way to safely re-add or re-link an attachment without first trashing it?

I don't know what you mean by that. Nothing here required you to move anything to the trash.

linn.a · August 4, 2024

> "Or do you mean that you moved something to the trash and then added the same file to the parent item? Because that would be a totally separate attachment that wouldn't have the previous annotations."

- Yes I think this is what I did. Because I assumed that since the annotations are stored separately of the attachment file, I could get away with doing that.
Sorry, I forgot that I did this.

So I assume that in my case then, these annotations are not retrievable?

Now that I read the page you shared, I understand that the attachment title is something that can be easily changed. Thanks for sharing the page with me.

But consider a scenario where the path to the attachment file was a symlink and if I wanted the attachment to point to another location but the original file still exists at the symlink.
What could be done?

dstillman · August 4, 2024

So I assume that in my case then, these annotations are not retrievable?

No, sorry. Unless you didn't actually empty the trash, in which case you can just restore the original attachment.

But consider a scenario where the path to the attachment file was a symlink and if I wanted the attachment to point to another location but the original file still exists at the symlink.

You're talking about a linked file? You could temporarily move the original file out of the way and relink the file to the new location, but that's not any sort of normal situation or workflow. The standard way to handle linked files is to set up a linked attachment base directory, which can always be switched to a different location.