How to update/fix/see file link paths

teknowledgist

I have a (Windows) user who was storing her library of PDF articles on a network share and adding links to the files in Zotero entries. Recently, the network storage changed and she ended up changing drive letters. Zotero couldn't find the links.

We tried some things, and I think we have the original drive letter back (the user isn't sure). Zotero still can't find the files though. Maybe we made changes that messed it up, but the root of the problem is we don't know where Zotero is even looking.

If a user links a file to a reference and manually selects the file, where is that path stored? Can we see that path? Can we update it? I don't think this user was using relative paths because that is not the default and because the PDFs are all in user-named subfolders. I'm sure the home directory is/was the default too (so, not on a share).

Is this user now stuck going through hundreds (thousands?) of references and manually finding and linking to the articles she has saved? Because of a drive letter change?

Thanks for any input you may have.

dstillman

You can run Zotero with real-time debug output to see where it's looking — it will say when you try to open a file.

The Zutilo extension can help you batch-change file paths. But if you can temporarily restore the old location, the better thing to do is to set the attachment base directory to the root of the drive (or the user's own subdirectory), move it back to its new location, and then update the base directory to point to the new location — then all the files below it will remain accessible.

aurimas

But if you can temporarily restore the old location, the better thing to do is to set the attachment base directory to the root of the drive (or the user's own subdirectory), move it back to its new location, and then update the base directory to point to the new location — then all the files below it will remain accessible.

I don't think you need to actually restore the files to the said directory (which may be what Dan meant with the above), you just need to recreate the directory where the files would have been.

E.g. if your files were located in C:\old_location\dir\a\file1.pdf and C:\old_location\dir\b\file2.pdf and now you are storing them in E:\new_place\something\a\file1.pdf and E:\new_place\something\b\file2.pdf

Then, recreate C:\old_location\dir, point Zotero's _base_ directory to C:\old_location\dir, and then change it to E:\new_place\something

You can delete C:\old_location\dir after this.

teknowledgist

Thanks for the replies. Unfortunately, I am not the user, and the user is only quasi-aware of what has changed and what she tried. Neither am I very knowledgeable about Zotero or any other referencing system.

Part of the problem is I don't know exactly where Zotero thinks the files were before. It seems to me that if the reference/record can have an attribute for the path to attachment(s), that should be viewable in the record.

All that changed was the server. The share and all the folder paths are the same. The user isn't sure what drive letter they were using. When the server changed, they remapped to "Z:". They may have made other changes -- I kinda' doubt it, but I don't know. Zotero couldn't find the files. I came and tried adjusting the base directory and adjusting the relative path. Neither of those worked. I un/re mapped the share to "R:" (which is most likely where it was) and Zotero still isn't finding the files. If the path was on R:, then that would have done just what Aurimas suggested.

Of course, we can browse and link all the files, but that is a nightmarish proposition. I guess there is one important question yet to be asked/answered: Is there something a simple user could have done that would have caused all records/references to remain intact, but yet have lost the entire path to links so we have no chance of discovering/tweaking that path to the correct one?

Thanks.

dstillman

Part of the problem is I don't know exactly where Zotero thinks the files were before.

I explained how to check this above. There's no point speculating on the rest until you know where it's looking.

adamsmith

have a look at the Zutilo extension that Dan links to - it can relink in bulk and also tell you the current attachment link Zotero is using.

As for your question: no, there is no way regular usage of Zotero will change anything about the content of a link.

edit: If you really don't want to install Zutilo, you can run this through debug as suggested by Dan, but since it doesn't even require restart, doing this with Zutilo seems a lot easier.

teknowledgist

Zutilo helped with identifying that the drive letter had been changed. Thank you. Re-mapping the drive solved the immediate problem.

The next question is how to modify all the paths to be relative to a defined path in the Zotero settings. Zutilo has a modify path option, that can be applied to a selected set of references, but it is not clear what will be replaced. In other words, if two files are linked to:

Y:\references\topic 1\paper A\file X.pdf
Y:\references\topic 2\paper B\file Y.pdf

How do we mass remove only the "Y:\references" part so that we can change the root location to "R:\Jane\refs" and make the paths relative from there? If we put "R:\Jane\refs" into Zotero (or Zutilo), how does it know if the final paths should be:

R:\Jane\refs\references\topic 1\paper A\file X.pdf
or
R:\Jane\refs\topic 1\paper A\file X.pdf
or
R:\Jane\refs\File X.pdf
or even the nonsensical:
R:\Jane\refs\Y:\references\topic 1\paper A\file X.pdf

??

I apologize for my ignorance.

adamsmith

I'd test this out on a couple of files but essentially Zutilo does the equivalent of a "search and replace" - you first put in the part of the path you want to replace (i.e. Y:\references) and then the partial path you want to replace it with (i.e. R:\Jane\refs).

teknowledgist

Ah! I guess I should RTFM first. ha ha.

It was totally not clear in the interface that there would be a second prompt after the first or even that the first prompt was for the part of the path that would be replaced.

Thanks.

adamsmith

for me it says:
"Old partial path to attachments' directory to be replaced:"
I thought that was pretty clear?

teknowledgist

OK, I'm a dimwit. :)

In hindsight, it makes sense, but without knowing there would be a second input though I was nervous about messing up the user's setup (more than it already was).

I would prefer both the inputs in one window or the button for the first to be clearly a "Continue..." or "Next" to indicate there is more to do before the actual change occurs.

Thanks again.