Zotero ruined my file!!

dustin.t.reed
I was working on a research paper and when I went to refresh my footnotes, all my text turned into asterisks!!! Somehow it got saved that way and now I have a file with all my text (including footnotes) converted to this: *****

I had saved a temporary file under a different name in the same folder about 5 hours earlier. It was not open when this happened, yet when I went to open it, all its text was changed into and bunch of zeros!!

Does anyone know how all this happened and if there is any way I can recover either file? Apparently my autorecover wasn't working, and I am unable to find any .asd files corresponding to my paper on my hardrive.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
  • ajlyon
    What version of what word processor? What version of Zotero? What operating system?

    Can you create new documents and use Zotero with them?
  • dustin.t.reed
    Running OS X 10.6.7 with Word 2011. Running Zotero 2.1.6 with Firefox 4.

    Yes, I can create new docs and use Zotero with them. I can even add new footnotes in the corrupted files but the rest of the doc still remains the same after I add the note.

    I've uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox, Word, and Zotero as well as all my Word plug-in. Still, the doc is the same.

    I also get the following errors when I check for errors in Zotero:

    [JavaScript Error: "this._editor is undefined" {file: "chrome://zotero/content/bindings/styled-textbox.xml" line: 185}]

    [JavaScript Error: "The file 'van der Merwe - 1994 - Discourse Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew Grammar.pdf' would exceed your Zotero File Storage quota" {file: "chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/sync.js" line: 642}]
  • dustin.t.reed
    Also, my error report ID number is 988583393.
  • fbennett
    From the sound of it, there is a strong possibility that the cause lies in a system failure of some kind; Zotero plugins write only to specific fields within a document. Be very careful around the system that did this.
  • Simon
    It's pretty difficult to imagine Zotero doing this on its own, although it's possible that Zotero could trigger some sort of Word bug that would cause this. If you can send us the doc at support@zot...org, we'll see if we can figure out what happened.

    There are two possibilities: either something went wrong during a Zotero update operation and then you saved the file without realizing it was full of asterisks, in which case it's possible we can figure out and work around the problem if we can reproduce it; or Word corrupted the file while saving, in which case we're unlikely to be able to do anything about it.
  • dustin.t.reed
    Simon,

    I will e-mail you the file.

    Re: your two possibilities. It is likely that it is the first one. I'm pretty anal about saving, pressing ctrl+s just about every 2-3 minutes, especially after I've written something and am proofing over it. Thus, when I input a new footnote and then refreshed it, the whole document turned to asterisks, and for some reason I decided to save it right at that moment. It was already full of asterisks when I saved it.
  • Simon
    edited April 20, 2011
    I'm now leaning toward the latter possibility (Word corrupting the document during saving), since there's no way Zotero could have modified your unopened temp file. If you can reproduce it reliably, we can try to report it to Microsoft. I'll also look at the file itself and see if I can see what went wrong there, but I'm not too optimistic. It's possible you'll be better off if you save as a doc instead of docx.
  • dustin.t.reed
    Save it as a .doc instead of a .docx when working with it or to see if that will recover the file?

    Also, I have another paper that I wrote about 3 weeks ago using the Zotero citation Word add-on. I am able to open it and add citations without error. It references the same Zotero library as the corrupted files, but is located in a different folder location on my harddrive.

    If the corruption was due to Word, why did this file not also get corrupted?
  • Simon
    edited April 21, 2011
    Save as a .doc when working with it, although I'm not sure if it will help. The data in the file doesn't seem to be recoverable.

    This page indicates that this is a Word 2011 issue with no known cause. There is also a long thread on the Microsoft forums about the bug, and the Georgetown Law Center has even posted a warning about it. I find the number of people who have reported the bug somewhat terrifying, but it certainly doesn't seem to be related to Zotero.
  • dustin.t.reed
    I guess this is what I get for "upgrading" from Word 2008 to Word 2011 2 months ago.

    I certainly appreciate all your help.

    It is somewhat reassuring to know what happened and that it wasn't due to an error with Zotero.

    Thanks.

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