All groups and tags suddenly lost

[swekia]

JabRef 5.2--2020-12-24--6a2a512 Windows 10 10.0 amd64 Java 14.0.2

Hi,

I just discovered that all the groups that I've created (many, many hours of manual work) disappeared. I haven't been using JabRef much after I updated to 5.2, so I cannot say for sure whether this issue must be related to updating.

About the groups/tags: I had many groups, based on keywords, explicit selection and free search expressions. Now there's no group left. In the bibtex file, there are some groups = {Keywords} if any (which is not useful at all).

To be honest, I'm really angry at the moment as I'm not using JabRef for fun but really need it for work and I cannot waste that much time on recreating tagging, grouping etc. over and over again. Some months ago, I had a similar problem with the "read status" that got lost arbitrarily. At the moment, I've no trust in JabRef's reliability anymore.

What can I do now?

Thanks in advance and best regards

[koppor]

@swekia Do you have an old version of the file? Maybe a .bak file? What is at the end of the .bib file? It should look as follows: https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/blob/f26e25b7bedbbae81f3bec8b30dd482aba3d251c/src/test/resources/testbib/jabref-authors.bib#L3008

[swekia]

Yes, I'm lucky that I could restore my old bib file from a backup. Nonetheless, I think it shouldn't be necessary to do that; especially, as not everyone is backing up.

EDIT: I've just found that again, the groups are gone. Seriously?!

[calixtus]

Thanks for your issue report. This sounds indeed like a serious problem.

Can you provide us with some more information, when this is happening, what action leads to loosing you groups? When did you notice?

Would it be possible for you to take a quick look into your bib file and tell us, if there is still a groups = {...} line included in your bibentries and at the end of the file if there is something like this:

@Comment{jabref-meta: grouping:
0 AllEntriesGroup:;
1 StaticGroup:SomeGroupName\;0\;1\;0x8a8a8aff\;\;\;;

Do you have any other programs running working on the same library at the same time, like a texeditor? Did JabRef show a warning about the library having changed?

[swekia]

Thank you for your reply. Actually, I cannot say if this is happening on a regular basis. I noticed it twice but for the first time this happened, I cannot say when exactly that was. For the second this it was just the day after I restored my file from backup.

Yes, currently, the groups are fine, this is an excerpt of the bibtex file:

@Article{riedhammer2012revisiting,
  author     = {Riedhammer, Korbinian and Bocklet, Tobias and Ghoshal, Arnab and Povey, Daniel},
  journal    = {2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
  title      = {Revisiting semi-continuous hidden Markov models},
  year       = {2012},
  pages      = {4721--4724},
  file       = {:kaldi/riedhammer2012revisiting.pdf:PDF},
  groups     = {Keywords},
  keywords   = {automatic speech recognition; acoustic model; kaldi; hidden markov models},
  readstatus = {skimmed},
}

...

@Comment{jabref-meta: grouping:
0 AllEntriesGroup:;
1 StaticGroup:Keywords\;0\;1\;0x8a8a8aff\;\;group from keywords\;;
...
2 KeywordGroup:Automatic Speech Recognition\;2\;keywords\;automatic speech recognition\;0\;0\;1\;0x8a8a8aff\;\;\;;
3 KeywordGroup:Speech Recognition\;0\;keywords\;speech recognition\;0\;0\;1\;0x8a8a8aff\;\;\;;
3 KeywordGroup:Word Recognition\;0\;keywords\;word recognition\;0\;0\;1\;0x8a8a8aff\;\;\;;
...
2 KeywordGroup:partly\;0\;readstatus\;partly\;0\;0\;1\;0x8a8a8aff\;\;\;;
2 KeywordGroup:read\;0\;readstatus\;read\;0\;0\;1\;0x8a8a8aff\;\;set readstatus to "read"\;;
1 SearchGroup:Books\;0\;entrytype=book\;0\;0\;1\;\;\;\;;
}

(I put the ... for shortening.)

I use old-fashioned TeXnicCenter but only for compiling the bibliography, so it shouldn't change anything in there. I've checked that the "last modified" date of the .bib file doesn't change when compiling with TeXnicCenter.

Is it possible that this problem is related to exporting the bib-file? I found that "Save selected as plain BibTeX" seems to definitely remove all JabRef metadata. Is that on purpose?

Usually, I export only the files I need for my current project to a separate .bib file, so I don't overwrite the big one. So to my current understanding, everytime I change something in JabRef and press Ctrl + S, the .bib file is updated with the latest changes, isn't it? And when I export selected entries as plain BibTeX, I export the single items only. Is that correct?

[calixtus]

I thought we deactivated the stale bot... Sorry.

[ThiloteE]

This issue here is probably caused by #8836 and #7129

I assume what happened is the following:

1. There was file A with groups.
2. File A was exported.
   • with groups in the groups field,
   • but without the data that allows JabRef to detect groups listed in the sidepane. --> File B came into existence
3. File B was imported into JabRef