"My Library" is completely locked

fabienne.schneider

Dear support team,

it seems like I have a problem with my account, the "My Library" storage is completely inaccessible.
I tried creating and deleting items, nothing works, even the purge function in my "Storage" settings doesn't work.
I tried using the new Zotero 5 Beta too, but as soon as I try to sync my library, the green arrow keeps spinning forever.
I still have access to groups as it seems, it's just my own storage that's affected by this problem.
Could you please check if my account is locked up in some way?
Thank you in advance for any help that you can possibly provide.

Yours sincerely,
Fabienne

bwiernik

The Zotero developers will need to check your account, but it sounds to me like you have just made massive amounts of changes to your account (e.g., after purging storage, Zotero is now trying to upload every attachment file in your library), which will make an initial sync take a long time. It is strongly recommended that you do not use any of the advanced functions like purging storage without being advised to on these forums, as they will almost never help and usually will make any problems worse.

To troubleshoot your syncing problems, start here:
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/changes_not_syncing

dstillman

There was a server-side issue here — @fabienne.schneider, try now. (But what bwiernik says about things like purging is true.)

fabienne.schneider

Thank you very much @dstillman, everything is working fine again.
I did indeed try a lot of things after I realized that my library is not functioning properly anymore. I don't want to bother the support team before I tried everything I can, to fix it myself, after all. But the purging was a last resort, it's not like I just started hitting the purge button for no reason, my library was already completely locked when I tried that.

Any idea as to what might have triggered the server-side issue?
Is it possible that it was caused by me editing / overwriting a PDF that was uploading to the Zotero server in that same moment?
If that's the case, deactivating the automatic sync feature would be very beneficial for me and should prevent another problem like that in the future, shouldn't it?

Thanks for your kind help once again and have a nice day.

adamsmith

The problem was server-side, nothing you did caused this.

I did indeed try a lot of things after I realized that my library is not functioning properly anymore. I don't want to bother the support team before I tried everything I can, to fix it myself, after all.

yeah, as bwiernik says, while we appreciate the sentiment, we'd discourage that approach. If you want to be super-thorough, you can try searching the forums or google for your exact(!) problem and see if something useful comes up, but really if something isn't working, you should just post here pretty much straight away.
What you absolutely should not do is perform any troubleshooting steps you aren't 100% confident you understand, such as using purge for a locked library error message. E.g. in this case, purge affects stored files and your error was data sync, so there was absolutely zero chance this would have helped -- in this case, you likely just added extra stress on the server and some additional time to your next sync, but in other cases you can actually make things a good bit worse. We'd really much rather answer a couple more questions.