syncing issues

mibigo

Hi

I'm having problem since some days syncing my library and a group library. I can't really understand where the problem is hence I don't know if this has already been posted in the forum. I apoligize for possible duplicate: Here you have the report id:799905967

The error message (and the report itslef to me is quite vague). However I relaize two different kind of problems:
1) this error message reported in the bug ID, an extreme slowliness due to zotero standalone constantly trying to sync.
2)in both zotero add-on and standalone version, i note sicne already sometime that despite, my regular clean-up of items and collections (renaming oflders, moving them, moving items among flders..etc in an effort to keep a coherent library) , when I then eventually sync, everything is messed up again, zotero pretending some local-remote conflicts and then restoring always the pre-clean-up situation, which obliges me to redo it from the scratch and also creating lots of duplicates. By the way, in group libraries as far as I understand there is no way to de-duplicated items, is that right?

Kind regards
Michele

adamsmith

2) you can de-dupe in groups: right-click on the group library and select "Show Duplicates".

The problem I'm expecting is that other people are adding items to the same collection you're trying to clean up. That will currently cause exactly the type of conflict you describe. You'll want to make sure everyone in the group is using automatic sync so that changes sync immediately to prevent such conflicts.

mibigo

Thanks Adam, for both answers. As far as reappearance of cleaned up collections and items I'm a bit puzzled. I do these clean-up regularly and also only limited to my personal library. The typical example is that: I always have a top folder called "new" where I put all new references I grab the day when I do massive scanning of articles (typically when I receive an alert that a new issue has been published). Then maybe two days after, I do the proper distribution to relevant subject folder / completion of missing data and sync. Sometimes I do that from home in the weekend. And then when I come back to office and sync the PC there, it takes a lot and almost every time I'm presented whit a message "folders and items have been removed/changed remotely - local items will be kept" or something alike and then I'm presented a merge window where I'm requested to manually confirm the merge of a varying number of items, sometime even 200.. The result is invariably that the "new" folder is repopulated with the items I had cleaned up. But those items are also in the destination folder where i had put them during the cleanup. I don't understand
Sorry for being lengthy

adamsmith

One other way that might happen is if your system times are not right; especially likely on Windows.

mibigo

thanks, to be honest this sync is a real issue; I checked time set on all the PCs mine and of the colleague who works on the shared library and there are no differences; however this week it did it again! I passed the weekend cleaning up the shared library, restructuring folders, de-duplicating and deleting hundreds of references; than I synced, back to office sync again, everything OK. The day after my colleague sync himself, and is the mess again, all his references (that I had cleaned) were uploaded again! It's quite frustrating working this way, you never know what will happen.

dstillman

It sounds like one or both of you still isn't using auto-sync, as adamsmith said above. If you make lots of collection-item membership changes between syncs on different computers, the current version of Zotero will re-add any removed items to be safe, because it doesn't know which is the later set. The next major version of Zotero will handle this better, but for now you really want to make sure everyone has auto-sync enabled and make sure you're fully synced before making changes — then no one will ever be more than 15 seconds behind the latest version.

mibigo

Thanks for your answer, Dan. Well I'm using since admasmith pointed it out, but my collegaue didn't. We will set the auto-sync on. To be honest I thought it was safer to sync form time to time only when you were sure the collection was ok, but apparently this is not the case. so we'll change our habits.

adamsmith

(The collection-sync behavior isn't ideal and my understanding is that it will change with the next major Zotero version, so this will improve).

Nemours

I have just created a group and the two members of the group would like to load their libraries to the group library. Both have syncing enabled but neither member can see the group library where it is supposed to be (in the left column). Why would the group library not appear?

DWL-SDCA

Group members must have the right privilege level. See:
https://www.zotero.org/support/groups

adamsmith

not to see the library, no. Any group member would see it, regardless of privileges. Most likely they have group libraries collapsed on the left. They'd need to click on the little triangle next to "Group Libraries". If that's not it, they may not have synced successfully since joining the group.