After backup and restore, attached file could not be found

seank

Hi,

I recently had to reinstall windows on my laptop. I had backed up the zotero library directory to an external drive and after reinstalling zotero standalone, I copied it to the local appdata folder. When I open zotero, my library is correctly displayed however all pdf attachments give me the "attached file could not be found" popup. I can search in the zotero storage folder for the file and find it but doing that everytime I want to open a pdf will be too tedious (library is 2200 items).

The one difference is that it seems my user name is different on windows. Previously it was 'computer_user', now it is a name. So the full path is different, but the relative path from the zotero folder is the same.

Zotero Standalone 4.0.29.17
Windows 10
library is and was in default directory (appdata\roaming\...)

Thanks in advance

dstillman

There shouldn't really be any way for this to happen for stored attachments. Are the attachments showing as stored or linked? (The latter have a little chain in the icon.)

Can you provide a Debug ID for an attempt to open a file that's missing?

seank

Thanks for your suggestion. They are stored, not linked. With the debug log I could see where it was looking and that particular folder does not exist (it is otherwise looking in the correct zotero\storage directory). In a couple of cases I found the file in a different folder by windows search and was able to update the location in Zotero. After restarting again, I am not able to recreate the problem with Zotero not finding files that I then find elsewhere. Some are completely gone though (and I don't find them in windows either).

At this point it looks like something may have gone wrong when I backed up the library. It doesn't seem to be a problem with Zotero. Here is a debug ID for after attempting to open to files that failed just in case. I did not find these elsewhere by windows search though.

debugID: D1971709827

Thanks for your help.