Disk issues after upgrade

naoh99 · 2024-11-01T18:22:26+00:00

After the upgrade to Zotero 7 (or the last smaller patch, did both in the past week or so), I noticed errors in software storing data on the same drive. It's a non system drive and not many programs use it for storage. Both Zotero and Obsidian reported "disk full" errors on a disk that usually has just above 200 GB of free space. The disk really showed 0 bytes left, a quick checkdisk clears it all up. All the "ghost data" shows as system data in drive details.
To eliminate sources, I did a clean start and only opened Obsidian. No change, everything fine. Once I open Zotero, system data starts growing. Easily 1 GB per minute. The weirdest part is, even after I close it, it just keeps growing. It seems only a restart will stop it.
I've gone through a system fix with Microsoft support as far as running an in place system upgrade (despite already having the latest Win 11 installed anyway).
I can really only look at Zotero as a source here.

Any ideas what could be causing this or how to stop it? Is it just Zotero zealously caching?

tnajdek · 2024-11-01T22:57:45+00:00

This is definitely not expected behavior.

In Windows Task Manager, is the value for "disk usage" really high for the Zotero process? (To use ~1GB per minute, it must consistently be above 17MB/s.)
Does this happen with all plugins for Zotero disabled?
If this continues to happen with all plugins disabled, could you please provide a Debug ID from the period where you observe heavy disk usage?

naoh99 · 2024-11-02T08:17:51+00:00

Thanks, the process investigation got me closer.
It's the Synology Drive process trying to synchronize changes to the currently not attached NAS. I guess it gets triggered by whatever Zotero does while running and just can't properly cope with it. That explains why the activity persists after shutting down Zotero. With the NAS attached and the sync running, the space allocation seems to work fine, it registers as regular files, not system files.
Big caveat: that setup isn't new, the issue however is. I've been having the NAS sync for a few years and Zotero 6 worked just fine like that, so the change still seems to have come with Zotero 7.