Upgrade StorageIgnores Prefs - loses all data
I'm on a project. I dropped documents and plugins and web pages and notes for 30 sites or so, into nice, little neat folders in Zotero.
I then realized that my working documents associated with my project (aka My Job) were in the profile subfolder in:
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/crazymozillanumber/Zotero/Storage
Is it just me, or is it a bit counterintuitive to have to drill down through 7 directories to access stuff that needs to be as handy as, say, a pile of 3x5s on a desktop?
Fortunately, right there in Zotero preferences was a setting to have files, etc, pushed out to a directory of my choosing. Perfect, right? Yeah, on paper... So I used the settings to put a new "Zotero" folder in the part of my folder structure where everything else, under the Sun, that has to do with my project, resides.
On the very next site, I opened Zotero to add data to my project folder, and guess what? All that was there, in Zotero, was the welcome to Zotero blurb file... And of course it also said that the plugins I had installed 5 minutes before, were not installed.
So, I went to the folder I had created (the one that was still listed in Zotero prefs), and dragged a simple 'alias' of my docs back to the other Zotero folder 7 flights down... That didn't work either, as Zotero now loaded a new file into the correct folder, but failed to see or list the rest of the project and also failed to see the plugins that were there.
Why have the preference settings if the utility can't deal with them? There's something about blatantly illogical function, in an environment that is nothing but 'logic' that has always really bothered me. I understand that programmers are not the most intuitive types, but the acceptable trade-off, for me, at least, is, well then, at least be logical.
So I deleted the 'alias', because Zotero had no idea what was in the folder, anyway, and Zotero violated the Apple API and deleted the folder that the alias was merely a 'pointer' towards. " Deleting an alias on a Mac, or certain links on Unix, does not 'clobber' the original. Not before tonight anyway.
I suppose I could have left everything 7 folders beneath my working directory, and just dragged n alias from the crazy "profiles" sub-directory to where the other 99.999% of my work happens. Oh well, c'est la vie. Still, if the prefs had a rational impact on the UI, none of this would have occurred then, would it?
On paper, this is an amazing utility, but in practice it's totally unacceptable, in its present iteration (which, no doubt, is some Mac 'flaw' rearing its head in a winblows world, again).
There is a bright side to it all. I was initially thinking of downloading the version, in beta, that works with Office 2008, but was put off by the warning to, 'not trust it on production data.' Ha ha ha, very good guys, ya got me. That's one in a row.
I then realized that my working documents associated with my project (aka My Job) were in the profile subfolder in:
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/crazymozillanumber/Zotero/Storage
Is it just me, or is it a bit counterintuitive to have to drill down through 7 directories to access stuff that needs to be as handy as, say, a pile of 3x5s on a desktop?
Fortunately, right there in Zotero preferences was a setting to have files, etc, pushed out to a directory of my choosing. Perfect, right? Yeah, on paper... So I used the settings to put a new "Zotero" folder in the part of my folder structure where everything else, under the Sun, that has to do with my project, resides.
On the very next site, I opened Zotero to add data to my project folder, and guess what? All that was there, in Zotero, was the welcome to Zotero blurb file... And of course it also said that the plugins I had installed 5 minutes before, were not installed.
So, I went to the folder I had created (the one that was still listed in Zotero prefs), and dragged a simple 'alias' of my docs back to the other Zotero folder 7 flights down... That didn't work either, as Zotero now loaded a new file into the correct folder, but failed to see or list the rest of the project and also failed to see the plugins that were there.
Why have the preference settings if the utility can't deal with them? There's something about blatantly illogical function, in an environment that is nothing but 'logic' that has always really bothered me. I understand that programmers are not the most intuitive types, but the acceptable trade-off, for me, at least, is, well then, at least be logical.
So I deleted the 'alias', because Zotero had no idea what was in the folder, anyway, and Zotero violated the Apple API and deleted the folder that the alias was merely a 'pointer' towards. " Deleting an alias on a Mac, or certain links on Unix, does not 'clobber' the original. Not before tonight anyway.
I suppose I could have left everything 7 folders beneath my working directory, and just dragged n alias from the crazy "profiles" sub-directory to where the other 99.999% of my work happens. Oh well, c'est la vie. Still, if the prefs had a rational impact on the UI, none of this would have occurred then, would it?
On paper, this is an amazing utility, but in practice it's totally unacceptable, in its present iteration (which, no doubt, is some Mac 'flaw' rearing its head in a winblows world, again).
There is a bright side to it all. I was initially thinking of downloading the version, in beta, that works with Office 2008, but was put off by the warning to, 'not trust it on production data.' Ha ha ha, very good guys, ya got me. That's one in a row.
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Are you sure that the data is actually gone? What, if anything, can you find in your Firefox profile folder? Do you have any recent backups of your data? Many members of the Zotero development team (including this one) use Macs, and what you're describing is quite simply impossible. Please take a look at our documentation on troubleshooting Zotero data and feel free to ask questions here first, before accidentally deleting your data.
Please also note that, regardless of storage location, you can access any Zotero attachment via the Zotero interface by clicking "Show File" for that attachment.