Your Zotero profile cannot be loaded.

ahagerty
I've managed to make a complete mess of my zotero, and I would be really grateful for any help anyone can offer to sort it out. I have an older macbook running el capitan 10.11.6. I have an enormous zotero (stand alone) library and my old computer has been slow, so I moved my library to an external hard drive. That worked, and I think I do indeed have it on my external hard drive because right after I did it, I was able to open it via the external hard drive.

After moving my library to the external hard drive, I was then trying to get rid of my zotero library on my computer to free up room. So, I dragged some things with zotero in the name to the trash and emptied the trash. As you can tell by this description, I am not very computer literate. When I tried to open to zotero, I got the error message "Your Zotero profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible." I then tried to reinstall zotero (oh so many times) and got the same error message.

I can access my library in zotero.org and I can see it on my external hard drive, so I think my library is safe, but what should I do? I read a few messages on the forum that addressed this error message, but they were too technical and complicated for me to follow.

Or, should I not worry about it and just use my library online? Is that an option?

I would be so grateful for any help anyone can offer me!

Alex

  • adomasven Zotero Team
    You need to let Zotero know where your new data directory is. See here https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#where_did_my_items_go
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    But the "Zotero profile" error may point to a different problem — the Zotero profile directory is a different directory from the data directory. Make sure that, if you deleted anything in that path, you deleted the whole thing so that it's recreated on the next Zotero startup. In other words, if you deleted the [randomstring] directory, you also deleted Zotero/Profiles/ within Application Support.

    Note that you'll have to access the ~/Library (that's /Users/[you]/Library) directory to see this, which you can do by holding down Option when clicking the Go menu in the Finder.

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