.zotero-ft-unprocessed

aneary25

Hi, I have recently had to reset my computer and that includes all my apps. I redownloaded zotero and synced it with my account. All the documents appear but I cannot open any of the non-PDF files. When I click on them they all say they are in the form of a .zotero-ft-unprocessed file and I am wondering how to process them since I really don't want to have to go and find all these papers again. Please help!

bwiernik

Those files are Zotero’s full-text index (for searching), not the PDFs.

Have you finished syncing your library? If you have a large library, it’s likely that the PDFs haven’t finished downloading yet.

aneary25

I have tried multiple times to manually sync (Although it is set to automatically). I have even uninstalled and reinstalled zotero and resynced but the same situation occurs. The only thing I can think of is that maybe I didnt have enough storage before my computer was wiped so it didnt back it up on the cloud. I have since upgraded the storage in hopes that it would help but it did not. The size of my library should not be a problem as there is only ~200 documents.

adamsmith

I'm a bit confused how you would even see these files, though. They're in the Zotero data folder and wouldn't be visible during regular use. Could you say what exactly you are doing to get there (which might also give us a clue about what we're actually looking for in files)?

aneary25

Sure. I go into my files /User/aneary/Zotero/Storage. In there there are many files titled with random letters and numbers such as JMF3VP3D. Some of them have the attachments they are meant to like PDFs inside but others have the unprocessed files mentioned. I only went to the files because I was getting errors trying to open the papers from the app itself. Let me know if this helps.

adamsmith

But why do you go inside that folder in the first place? You should try to open files from Zotero, not go into the storage folder -- if you have files that are listed in Zotero that don't open, those are the ones you'd want to troubleshoot.

aneary25

None of the files that I had previously open from zotero, that is why I am going to the storage, to see what is wrong. On Zotero it shows my documents but it wont open and gives me for example:

The attached file could not be found at the following path:

C:\Users\aneary\Zotero\storage\JSLHVATC\Ishiguro et al. - 2018 - Base-pairing probability in the microRNA stem regi.pdf

It may have been moved or deleted outside of Zotero, or, if the file was added on another computer, it may not yet have been synced to zotero.org.

I would really like to fix this issue so I do not lose all my notes from the years, that would be a huge loss.

dstillman

The message means what it says. You haven't yet synced the files to zotero.org, because you were previously out of space.

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/452553/#Comment_452553

aneary25

Ok well the computer is the same but it has gone through a reimaging. Is there a way to retrieve them and my notes? I understand that they would not have been synced because I was out of storage but to my knowledge that would mean I cannot retrieve the notes and papers by syncing now.

dstillman

If you didn't sync the files, the computer was wiped, and you don't have a backup of your Zotero data directory from before that, the files wouldn't be available anymore. There's no secret way to get them back.

If you were using the Zotero PDF reader and by "notes" you mean PDF annotations (highlights, etc.), technically those still exist in your Zotero database, so if you redownload a PDF file from the publisher and use the Locate button to add it back to Zotero (which will copy the file back to its appropriate folder in the data directory, after which you can delete the original), you'd be able to open the file and view the annotations again. (Of course, if you download a different version of the file, the annotations might not line up.) PDF annotations will also be viewable separately from the PDF in a future version of Zotero.

In any case, you should talk to your IT department. It would be incredibly irresponsible for them to reimage a computer without making a backup first.