Upgrade StorageImporting RDF creates multiple duplicates on export.
Hi all,
I right click a sub-collection in Zotero on Firefox in Xubuntu 14.04 and export it as RDF. Hop on another machine with Xubuntu 16.04, export it to a freshly installed and empty Zotero and I get a heap of duplicate sub-collections when the export is complete. Not all of them, just some (most).
Both versions of Zotero are the same; 4.0.29.10.
Kinda frustrating and needing to get fixed to proceed so wondering if anyone has experienced this or similar or may have a clue what's happening.
In the meantime I'll keep digging. Tnx in advance.
I right click a sub-collection in Zotero on Firefox in Xubuntu 14.04 and export it as RDF. Hop on another machine with Xubuntu 16.04, export it to a freshly installed and empty Zotero and I get a heap of duplicate sub-collections when the export is complete. Not all of them, just some (most).
Both versions of Zotero are the same; 4.0.29.10.
Kinda frustrating and needing to get fixed to proceed so wondering if anyone has experienced this or similar or may have a clue what's happening.
In the meantime I'll keep digging. Tnx in advance.
(It sounds like you know what you're doing, but just to be sure and for others' sake, let me mention that RDF export is not the way to go for transferring whole libraries: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/transferring_a_library )
Guess a clumsy workaround could be to copy the whole library (which is huge and don't need on the other machine, which is why I didn't want to do that), see if that works and if so, delete the sub-collections I don't need.
* Update: Just to add. I actually have Zotero standalone installed with the Firefox plugin. Just trying with the standalone directly. Import the RDF sub-collection in and noticed a pattern. The duplicates increase depending on the level the sub-collection is on.
For instance, 'My Library' is fine, so are the first first three levels. But when I click a sub-collection on the fourth level, duplicates. Every further sub-collection level adds another duplicate: next leve has three of everything. Next sub-collection, four.
Puzzled. :|
Will try the regular way and copy the whole shebang then delete ones I don't need. See if that kills the dupes. Phew. The only positive is that hopefully that will only need to be done once. :)
Also wondering if getting rid of the standalone and trying the Firefox plugin version only might make a difference. If I do and it does, will post that here. How would I unlink the standalone from Firefox when I delete the standalone files? Easy as installing the Zotero extension in Firefox?
Thanks for the tips.
Yep, seems that as it was coming from a library created using the Firefox extension, not the standalone, the dupes were created on import. When I uninstalled the standalone, installed the Firefox extension and tried again, fine. No dupes.
I downloaded the standalone originally and just booting from the icon in there. It creates /.zotero in your /home directory. Remove that to remove standalone. On first boot of the Zot Firefox extension, it will say the data directory is missing, want to use Firefox profile? Agree> Import> no duplicates! :)
I guess the upshot of all this is that exporting libraries from the extension and importing to the standalone produces duplicates, at least for me. Curious if it does for anyone else, or vice versa.
Hope that helps someone. Cheers.
(PS: Is there any protocol for marking this as solved here?)
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/57356/some-collections-duplicated-after-importing/
but the discussion here seems more pertinent. Note that I've reproduced this problem exclusively in Standalone with the Chrome connector:
I'm having what sounds like the same problem when trying to use import under Standalone to merge two libraries as recommended here:
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/merging_libraries
Having exported either an entire library or an individual collection as Zotero RDF with "export files" checked, on import I get a new collection containing the exported library/collection. The top level of this collection contains all the items in the imported sub-collections below it. I guess this makes sense if the import was a whole library, less so if it was a collection and recursive collections is not enabled (it isn't in my case).
My main problem, however, lies in the imported sub collections. The first two levels (so collections and their sub-collections in the original library) are fine. The next level (sub-sub-collections) all get duplicated. The level after that (sub-sub-sub-collections) get triplicated, etc. If my original export was a collection rather than the full library, the same effect occurs except all the duplication/triplication etc. is moved down a level.
With big libraries it's really a huge effort to go through the entire hierarchy deleting all the duplicates. Is this actually a bug or am I missing some fundamental point about the way export/import works?
Beyond this, I'm having a range of export/import problems (stand-alone notes going blank, pdf items being given the icon of web snapshots) but I'll save these for another thread if I can't resolve them as I've not been able to reproduce under all conditions and can't decouple from the export taking place across different machines with different OS's. The duplication, however, I can reliably reproduce between Zotero profiles on the same machine (using Standalone+Chrome connector).
Any advice gratefully received!
Sorry for missing this at the time — most people talking about duplicates with export/import are referring to the duplicates you get normally if you export a library and reimport it, so we missed that this was describing a very real bug.