Deleting Huge Trash

chrismckinny

For some reason when I tried to upload a local large collection file to a group library it did not upload it to the group library - but instead placed it within my local library - but it did this only after several months after I had tried it around 4 different times. The result of this was that I had four duplicates of a collection of around 40K records. In order to remedy this problem I deleted the files from the "unfiled files" but when I did this Zotero completely froze as it will not allow me to delete the files (which are around 170K). Is there anyway to fix this, besides waiting 30 days until they delete automatically?

UPDATE: I left it "spinning" for four hours and it deleted the files

dstillman

We'll be speeding this up in a future version. Note that you can also delete in batches from the trash, for what that's worth.

dannilamb

Hi, I'm also having problems with this, except despite trying several times and leaving it 'spinning' for hours at a time, my standalone eventually crashes when I try to clear my trash (16,000+ items). It only seems to let me delete 3 items at a time in batches. Is there any other way to do this?

dstillman

You're saying if you try to delete 4 items at a time, it freezes and crashes? That seems highly unlikely.

dannilamb

Yes, if I highlight any more than three items and use the delete key (or the backspace key) it just doesn't do anything. Doesn't seem to matter how long I leave it, nothing happens. I've tried four items, 100 items, 1000 items at a time, nothing seems to work. I've just left it for 5.5 hours trying to delete the whole Trash folder, and when I returned it wasn't saying it hadn't worked, but it wouldn't let me click on anything other than the X to close the whole programme, and when I restarted it hadn't deleted anything.

dstillman

Is it actually four items, or is it a specific item?

Can you generate real-time debug output for trying to delete four items? While it freezes, is there output being generated? If so, copy as much of it as you can and send it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread. If there's not continuous output, copy as much as you can from the end of the output.

dannilamb

Thanks for this, I have sent an email with the debug output (though there seems to be no activity once I've hightlighted 4 items and pressed delete). Re your question about whether it's a specific item, I've tried different selections of 4 items and it still won't delete them. But I have just tried deleting 4 items that didn't contain any with PubMed entry links, and it would do that (I captured as much of the activity as I could while it did that and emailed it too), so it looks like the problem is with any item with a PubMed entry link attached to it (many of the 18k items in my Trash have these).

Is there a way to sort by items that have attachments so that I can delete everything that doesn't have a PubMed link? (I've tried sorting by item type but this doesn't sort e.g. within Journal Article those with attachments and those without).

dstillman

Oh, just focus the items list and press "-" to collapse all items. Then you'll be able to delete as many items as you want. Currently, if a parent item was moved to the trash and you have one of its child items selected in the trash, it won't allow you to delete from the trash (because the child item isn't technically in the trash on its own, though obviously it should still allow the delete to go through (and I've created an issue to fix that in a future version)).

If you've moved attachments to the trash separately without trashing the parents, the parent items will be gray. Don't select those.

dannilamb

Great, thanks, it's now letting me delete batches (though takes 5-10 minutes of 'Not Responding' to do so for each 2k items I select and delete). Each time it has deleted a batch it seems to reset itself so that all the parent/child items are expanded to show the child item (and so I have to "-" every time). It seems to do this when new items are added to the trash, even if they haven't been expanded in the library. So there's a default of expanding parent items in the Trash folder. Is there any way of changing this default so that the Trash doesn't expand parent/child items?

Also, if this is the Zotero default (expanding items in the Trash), rather than some bug in my Standalone, could something be added to the documentation about needing to collapse Trash items before they can be deleted? It seems like a problem others must have had before.

Thanks for your help in solving the problem.