Deleting attachments from hard drive

jerryplotnick

To learn Zotero, I imported a subset of references from another reference manager, manipulating and therefore compromising some of the references for testing purposes. I would like to delete all of the references along with the physical copies of the attachments on my hard drive. But I noticed that when I deleted a reference, the attachment remained at Zotero/Storage. So I followed the instructions at

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/20148/deleting-attachment-notes

by creating a saved search consisting of all attachments in the library, selecting all, right clicking, and clicking Move Items to Trash. However, the PDFs remain in their folders at Zotero/Storage.

I guess I could just delete everything in Zotero/Storage, but I'd like to be able to control what happens to attachments directly from Zotero, which seems like a much more transparent and a safer way to manipulate one's material. Is there a way, then, to delete attachments directly in Zotero? And what is the rationale for keeping attachments after the references are gone?

adamsmith

did you empty the Zotero trash? Zotero does remove file attachments of deleted files from storage.

jerryplotnick

Thanks. I completed missed that. I had tried to locate a command with Trash in it on the Help menu, and nothing came up.

Not out of the woods yet, though. When I select multiple items in Trash, right click, and click Delete items . . . nothing happens. Do I need to delete one reference at a time?

adamsmith

right-click on the trash, empty trash

adamsmith

(I think deleting should work, too, though, not sure why it doesn't; might take some time for large delete operations)

jerryplotnick

Thanks.