Sync problem and Firefox freeze

ssalo

A similar problem appears on old discussions, but none of the solutions in those seems to apply.

I have a new computer running Windows 8, 64 bit, and Firefox 32 bit.

Opened the Zotero pane and clicked on the sync to access and edit my personal and group libraries. The sync arrow continued to run for hours and apparently accomplished nothing.

During this time Firefox updated itself from 22 to 23.

After the update, Firefox freezes (not responding) about 30 seconds after the Zotero pane is opened.

I cannot find a way to stop the sync. I cannot use any of the features of Zotero from the pane.

One suggestion made in an earlier thread was to use a 64-bit version of Firefox. Mozilla says that there is no "official" 64-bit version and that the 32-bit version should work well with Windows 8 64-bit. I think the 64-bit version is called Nightly, and I cannot be sure this is a stable application.

What is the solution?

dstillman

Since you have a very large library to download, if you still have your data on another computer or in a backup you can transfer your data to this computer and avoid the large sync. (If you do this, temporarily disable auto-sync first in the Sync pane of the Zotero prefs—and you can of course do this if you just want to use Firefox without it freezing.)

Beyond that, it should eventually finish if you let it go, unless you're sitting some sort of memory limit, but if that were the case Firefox would likely just quit. (You can look in a task manager to see if it's actually using the CPU.) One thing you could try is installing Zotero Standalone, which will share the same data directory by default, and syncing with that. At the very least, you could let that go without it interfering with Firefox.

But just copying your data from another computer would be the easiest thing to do.

We're working on a new sync architecture for the next major version of Zotero that should avoid problems with very large syncs like this.