Lost categories

yaxu
Hi,

I have a group library with a paid storage plan that I have curated over some years:
https://www.zotero.org/groups/2575560/alpaca/library

All the categorisation has disappeared. This is a real setback and I have no idea what happened. Can the categories somehow be recovered?

Best wishes
  • dstillman
    You're either misremembering this or you haven't checked the library in a few months. A couple dozen collections were deleted at the end of July — if you email support@zotero.org with a link to this thread we can tell you did that — but not since then.

    If those are what you're referring to, a computer of any member of the group that hasn't synced since then would be able to restore these using Replace Online Library, but otherwise I'm afraid there's no way to recover them.

    (In Zotero 7, collections are moved to the trash instead of deleted outright.)
  • yaxu
    Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, I've emailed that address.

    There are now a lot of duplicated entries. Is it the case that the entries are all present, and it's just the subcollections that are lost?
  • yaxu
    Looking at the mess of entries that are left, it does look like some kind of data corruption to me, rather than something someone has done deliberately.
  • dstillman
    edited October 12, 2024
    I emailed you the person who deleted the collections in July. And yes, it was just the collections. No items were deleted.

    Other than those collections and about 5 other items, the library hasn't changed since May, so whatever state it's in it was already in.

    (And there's no "data corruption" here. There would be duplicates because someone exported and imported the same data into the library. You can sort by Date Added to see the batches of items.)
  • yaxu
    Thanks, I got in contact with them and they said they installed zotero after a long time, saw it was downloading a lot of stuff, so deleted collections they didn't want.. Not realising that they were deleting them for everyone. If this seems to be common, perhaps the UI could be improved around deletions.

    By the way I noticed the 'added by' and 'modified by' fields are viewable in the web interface but not the app (7.0.5).

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