Fixing notes too long to sync

dstillman

This discussion was created from comments split from: Fixing Note too long to sync.

hy.acinth

I am having the same problem, and will follow. I only just started paying for cloud storage because after years of a workflow on one computer, I now need to access my collection on two computers. But I have many, many long notes. Also: of about 6K items, only about 1.7K are syncing to the cloud and the other computer. Not sure if these issues are related.

adamsmith

How long are these notes? The character limit for notes is 250,000, i.e. the length of a short book (formatting takes up some characters, but still). Given that, most of the time this message comes up, something else is going on, most commonly images embedded in notes before Zotero 6 (images in notes weren't supported and were known to cause sync issues).

hy.acinth

thanks for the response! I can't tell what notes. When I click the red exclamation point, I see "The note “From an interview: "how do you get to th…” is too long to sync. Shorten the note and sync again." I then click "show item in library" and... nothing happens. I'm not taken to any specific item. I tried searching for "from an interview" in my library (including notes) and I get no results.

Edit: I forgot to add, it's very possible that there are images in there. I often take screenshots during presentations and store them in my note from the presentation. Is there no solution to this? hunting down every single one of these notes is not an option for me. And, I can't imagine that's what's causing almost 4000 items to not sync.

dstillman

Not sure why the button isn't working for you, but you have to search in All Fields & Tags mode in the root of each library. It could also be an item in any of the trashes.

If you continue to have trouble, provide a Debug ID for a sync that triggers the error.

And to be clear, adding images to notes wouldn't have caused this since Zotero 6. This was a problem with images added to notes before Zotero 6, when it wasn't officially supported.

hy.acinth

Debug ID: D2141368222

hy.acinth

(sorry this wasn't clear before, but I was searching in All Fields & Tags already.)

hy.acinth

An update: since I ran the sync again to get the Debug ID, all items are now showing up in all 3 places (original personal device A, web library, new work device B.) Yay!

However....
1 - the error about a note being too long is still showing up on device A. and I'm still unable to see which item this is.
2 - my attached PDFs, still stored on device A in the zotero storage folder, are not syncing to the web library or device B. I'm getting the "attached file could not be found at the following path..." I'm also seeing that my online storage is at 0MB... which makes no sense.
3 - same as 2) for images embedded in notes... and maybe for other types of attachments.

hy.acinth

tried updating and running sync again... got this error message. 299694371. Debug id: D22030314

dstillman

It's an item in your trash. Empty your trash or search for JTPEF3UW or JKFXU3X3 (the parent item) there. We'll fix the button to select items in the trash in the next version. It should still show up for a search for the text in the trash.

I'm getting the "attached file could not be found at the following path..." I'm also seeing that my online storage is at 0MB... which makes no sense.

Data syncing for My Library is failing, so it's not continuing on to file syncing. Provide another Debug ID if you're still having trouble after resolving the above.

You've disabled file syncing for groups.

dstillman

(And yes, this is an item you added years ago, before Zotero 6 added support for images in notes. This would've been interrupting syncing since then.)

hy.acinth

So I deleted the item in the trash and then got a couple more errors about notes that were "too long" (although not that long actually) or had images... but just making an edit to those notes seemed to "update" them somehow so that they no longer held up the process. Looks like things are all synced now! Thank you so much for the help with this. Is there anything I should double check or do differently moving forward to prevent future problems like this? (for one thing I realize i need to clear my trash more often.)

adamsmith

The issue would almost certainly just have been old image notes -- any current ones are fine, so nothing you need to change.

hy.acinth

Ok. thanks all for all this help!

iagogv

The character limit for notes is 250,000

Is this configurable? If not, may you make available an option to configure this, even under the Advanced Configuration/Config Editor?

Thanks!

dstillman

No, it’s a server-side limit.

hy.acinth

Hello, I'm back.... I'm not sure how this happened or how I failed to catch it, but I now realize that somehow, either during this process or sometime after, many many many items have disappeared.

At first, in the months after the apparently successful sync, I just went to cite a few things that I thought would be in my library and they weren't, and I thought I was going crazy. it happened more times. I checked my oldest item and saw it was from 2014, so I thought maybe I just accidentally deleted a few random things.

It has kept happening though - I've been poking around and I now realize that almost everything in my library from before August 18 2018 is gone. EXCEPT 4 items (where there should be hundreds if not thousands) - 1 from 2014, 2 from 2015, and 1 from 2017. I don't know why those survived....but I missed the issue for a while because I was looking too quickly, saw "2014", and moved on.

I'm trying to figure out my options now.

I did make a backup of the whole local zotero folder before the sync, but I deleted it once I thought the sync was successful. I have time machine, but my external drive no longer goes a year back due to storage limits. I have spideroak backups, but I'm now realizing those are much better for individual files... I think it would be pretty messy to try to recreate a frankenstein zotero folder from there, but maybe possible.

Otherwise, I unfortunately only have a back up of the old zotero storage folder from around the right time (survived somehow on another stray hard drive.) I have gone and checked there and many of the old PDFs are there in the random folders - but of course they won't import because they're missing the database files. It would be unbelievable tedious to find them and import them in fresh, and I'd lose my notes.

Even if I can find an older version of the whole Zotero folder, restoring wouldn't solve my issue of what to do with the year of work since then.... maybe it's possible to make a new account from the old data, create a shared group library, and port items over to the new account? Or would it be better to export my current library and re-import that into a restored old library (if I can pull that off?) I know merging is hard.

I also still don't understand what happened. Maybe because those items were added in a much older version of Zotero? Was all that stuff somehow erroneously in the trash once I tried to sync it, and that's how I deleted it? How did I not notice that? Why did I not notice the difference in item #s during the sync? I thought I was checking. Does this have to do with something weird going on on my new work computer? Any suggestions?

Sorry this is such a long post! Trying to be thorough. And apologies in advance for slow response, I have to juggle figuring this out on top of the dumpster fire of regular work so I might not reply right away to everything.