"Sync full-text content"; one machine "Indexed: Yes" and another "Indexed: Queued"

rdiaz02

Zotero 8.0.3 on Linux, on two different machines.

Machine 1: running for a long time, and it is where the PDFs have been added. PDFs shown as "Indexed: Yes".

Machine 2: I just installed Zotero there. For most PDFs "Indexed: Queued".

In addition, the size of the zotero.sqlite file differs dramatically: 975 MB on Machine 1, 150 MB on Machine 2, which I attribute to the full text index in the db.

I was expecting that, since I have "Sync full-text content", the DB would be synced and no indexing would be needed on Machine 2. But my assumption is incorrect.

On re-reading https://www.zotero.org/support/preferences/sync#data_syncing I think I do not really understand:
"Sync full-text content: When checked, Zotero will sync the extracted text contents of your PDFs and other files, allowing you to perform searches across devices regardless of whether files have been downloaded to a particular device. This also allows for full-text searches in the web library."
So this means that if the files have been downloaded, they will be Indexed from scratch?

dstillman

Indexing of the synced full-text content happens in the background when the computer (or possibly just Zotero) is idle.

rdiaz02

Thanks for your reply. So the "sync full-text content" syncs the *extracted text data* but not the *processed search indexes*. Each machine rebuilds its own local index from the synced text content (and this explains that, right now, the sizes of the local dbs differ so much). I was missing the difference between the *extracted/synced text data* and the *local, specific to this machine, search index*.

dstillman

That's exactly right.