PDF Purging

davidpatterson43
Hi,

Nearly all of the PDFs have been purged from my library. I didn't do this, but I was close to my storage max (which i have since upgraded). Is there a way to restore all of these PDFs so that I can view and annotate them within Zotero?

Thanks in advance for the help!
  • dstillman
    edited August 19, 2025
    What do you mean by "purged from my library"?

    You have over 400 MB of files online. No other files have ever been uploaded, since you were at your storage quota. Now that you have more space, assuming you haven't changed the default settings, simply syncing from the device where the files exist will cause them to be uploaded and available online and on other devices.

    In general, see Files Not Syncing.
  • davidpatterson43
    Thank you - I can see the parental item and the place where the paper should be, but the link has been greyed out and get an error message stating that

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

    Nothing has been moved from particular folders on my computer, so I'm not sure where they all went.

    Thanks again.
  • davidpatterson43
    Also, I tried syncing and it didn't result in anything being restored
  • dstillman
    That message really means exactly what it says: either the file was moved/deleted outside of Zotero or it was added on another computer, in which case it wasn't previously synced because you were at your storage quota. The former would also include changing your Zotero data directory location without moving the folder properly.

    If you've only been using one computer, see Locating Missing Zotero Data for the info that can tell us whether something happened to your data directory.
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