Curious inverted WebDAV sync problem

diocletian
Hi, I recently had to swap laptops and after fumbling my WebDAV login I am now in a situation where I am successfully syncing with WebDAV but I have missing attachments in my local storage. I have 9.6 GB storage on my WebDAV server (box.com) and only ~5.6 GB in my local storage after successful sync. Attachments are set to download at sync time and I have verified my WebDAV login in zotero.

When I try to locate these attachments, most of them have full-text cache files but the PDF attachments are missing. The keys for these attachments do not appear to exist on my WebDAV server. I have NOT attempted any reset operation as my problem seems to be the inverse of what is typical (files are missing from local storage, not missing from the WebDAV server).

The Debug ID is D1739673800. Any suggestions?
  • adamsmith
    If you don't get any sync errors, you should reset file sync history (don't use any of the other reset options).
  • diocletian
    OK, thank you for this advice. I did this and most of the remaining attachments were restored. There is a small group (~100 items) that are not finding their attachments. So far so good. But when I restart zotero, there is a much larger group (~1000) that show missing attachments even though the sync completes with no errors. When I reset the file sync history from there, the process repeats (i.e., it finds most of the attachments except the last ~100). I have been through this cycle several times and I have no idea what is going wrong.

    The Debug ID is D2137893795. I did get an HTTP 502 error at on point, but it has not been a persistent error. The error ID for that is 1262360463 but it should be in the debug log as well.
  • dstillman
    I don't really follow — are you saying that files are accessible but then become inaccessible after a restart? That's not really something that's possible through Zotero itself. How are you determining that the files are missing, or present after resetting file sync history?
  • bwiernik
    I've seen dioclentian's setup. Currently, there are over 1000 items with missing attachments (empty attachment circle icons, missing file message when trying to open them). I'm not sure, but I suspect that restarting Zotero probably didn't change the accessibility of the items, only updated the display of filled or empty attachment circles. So the current status is basically that resetting file sync history did not fix the missing attachments in Zotero (which based on the size of the WebDAV files, seems to be related to a mismatch of item keys).
  • dstillman
    Right, given "The keys for these attachments do not appear to exist on my WebDAV server", they wouldn't — Reset File Sync History would only pull down files that for some reason weren't downloaded previously (which isn't supposed to happen anyway).

    Files Not Syncing has the relevant info on how to debug availability of specific files. Basically, if keys don't exist on the WebDAV server, the problem is on another computer.

    If the WebDAV server has many more files that aren't being pulled down, I'd guess that it has files from items that no longer exist. Zotero should periodically purge orphaned files on the WebDAV server, but I can't remember if that's currently enabled in 4.0 — it might be disabled until 5.0 due to some previous trouble with some servers.
  • diocletian
    Thanks Dan. Files Not Syncing is possible, but presumably I would have received a sync error which I did not. I will check into it further.

    Currently I have 3 types of attachments:

    1. Attachments that are marked present and have a valid path.

    2. Attachments that are marked absent but will sync after reset of file sync history (either "at sync time" or "as needed").

    3. Attachments that are marked absent and will not download despite having a storage key when I right-click to "show file". They also have a full text cache like "zotero\storage\B986CJWH\.zotero-ft-cache" but this storage key is not on the WebDAV server.

    Case #2 is repeatedly re-occurring after restart of zotero. Maybe it is impossible, but I have not had breakfast yet, so I believe it.

    For case #3 I am going to scan through the data from the WebDAV server to see if the missing attachments have been misfiled somehow.
  • diocletian
    I have new information - the attachments in case #2 are missing after sync. For some reason they are marked present, but clicking on them or restarting zotero causes the marks to be correctly displayed absent. The attachments can be accessed following another sync operation.

    Given that this trouble occurs after interaction with the server, I'm going to try to migrate to zotero storage. My institution upgraded my 3rd party storage account without notice (to "enterprise" level), and it seems possible this is breaking WebDAV in subtle undocumented ways.

    Thanks again for your help!
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