Sync error after updates

isabelosa

Hi everyone,

I have a macbook pro and I got a reboot last week. I went from macOS Sonoma 14.7 to Sequoia 15.1 (24B83). I didn't copy my entire mac on an external hard drive so I had to download all of my apps and stuff again.

I realized this morning that some external pdfs (not all of them) cannot be opened anymore on zotero. I had underlined a bunch of information that I don't want to lose.

To remedy this, I installed 7.0.10 zotero update.

However, it doesn't change anything. When I try to retrieve the pdfs following these steps (https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data), many files are simply empty.

What should I do? Have you heard of this issue?

dstillman

I got a reboot

I'm not sure what you mean by this? Do you mean that your computer was wiped and you no longer have your previous Zotero data directory? Needless to say, you should never wipe your computer without a full backup of the disk, which is trivial and inexpensive to do on a Mac with Time Machine and an external hard drive.

You have hundreds of items in your online library, so those would've synced down to the new empty installation, but you have almost no files in Zotero Storage. It looks like you were syncing files somehow through June of this year, but those files aren't on our servers, so either you were using WebDAV or at some point you used "Purge Storage in My Library" from your storage settings page to remove those files from our servers. If you were using WebDAV, you would need to configure your new installation the same way as before and you'd at least have the files through June. No files were synced between June and November, but I couldn't tell you why.

If you weren't fully syncing your Zotero library before, your only other option would be to restore from a backup of the Zotero data directory. But it sounds like you didn't make one before wiping your data?