Endless Sync Failures : Round and Round we Go

tomfjackson

4 times through the same drill. This 3rd computer not syncing. Click to resolve 341 conflicts, hit finish, approve all the changes in each folder it tells me about, then the dialog box on the last folder change goes white and I have to restart. Or it goes back to syncing with no results. Sync arrow goes round and round for hours. "Processing updated data from sync server." No error code with the orange "!" is present. Just click and back to resolve the same conflicts again. Only some conflicts have a button you can select, others just give 3 versions with one highlighted in red.
I am tempted to copy "Zotero" from my other computer and swap out the entire data base.
Is this going to cause me trouble?
Or should I just delete the library and try to re-create the library by syncing? How do you do that? (instructions ambiguous there). Is the problem space? I am at 83% of 6 GB but the folder has 10 GB in it.
Any help will be appreciated. Tom

tomfjackson

Options: I am thinking of doing this, though the data integrity check came out positive. But the process might be interminable; the problem is this is a university computer that goes to sleep every 30 minutes unless used:
(Zotero only syncs explicit deletions, so just syncing an empty library won't overwrite the server data unless you deleted items manually.)
If you have a local Zotero library that you want to overwrite, close Zotero and delete the old Zotero data directory before syncing.

So I keep everything until "Zotero" and then just delete the whole thing? Please tell me how long this will take of the almost 6GB of data and 600,000 or so files (I am now backing up from my other laptop).

tomfjackson

Here is my error report (just figured this out). 496079083
Yes I've been trying to sync for about 12 hours, but only for the last 4 have I just let it run without interference. I'll stay up as late as possible to keep the computer from going to sleep and interrupting, but no sync ever took this long.

adamsmith

you can manually transfer your library, yes. See the instructions here under option A:
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/transferring_a_library

dstillman

And note that copying 'storage' isn't really necessary, since any files you don't copy Zotero will just pull down once you have the updated database. So you can really just copy zotero.sqlite, which is likely no more than a couple hundred MB.

(If you can do the manual database transfer that's definitely easiest, but a Restore from Zotero Server in the Sync -> Reset pane of the Zotero preferences would probably also work. The server is returning your entire library within a few seconds each time, but your existing local database seems to have diverged in a way that's causing problems. A straight download sync to an empty library should be much quicker, though it's still a lot of data.)

tomfjackson

Dan,
Didn't see this so I copied the whole "Zotero" folder into the profile after deleting the old one.
Works flawlessly now -- fingers crossed -- but now I finally have a backup.
Given all the possibilities for file corruption, would just copying sqlite have been the safer bet, or is it good to have completely replaced it with the other computer's backup?
Thanks, Tom

adamsmith

copying the whole folder is perfectly fine, both options have the same outcome (in this case - in others copying your storage directory may be preferable), neither is more risky.