Can't access PDFs online or in Zotero Standalone

bookster808

Hi all,

I was having trouble accessing PDFs on Standalone, so I figured it was a syncing issue. Surprisingly, however, I no longer have access online either.

I have a Zotero.org account with 2 GB of storage. This has worked brilliantly - until now.

However, I do have access to the PDFs in my Group Library.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

bookster808

Bump

bwiernik

What exactly do you mean "can't access PDFs"? Are you saying that files aren't uploading from one computer to the Zotero.org web library? If so, check for sync errors on that computer, and also check the sync preferences to see that the "Sync attachment files in My Library..." box is checked.

bookster808

Thanks for the reply, @bwiernik. I double checked and I have sync set up in preferences. The situation is that I got a new computer, downloaded Zotero, and hoped that my items would be synced from online. But they haven't and, what's more, most don't appear online. The worst case scenario would be that somehow my local library overwrote the online, cloud backup. I pay for Zotero storage, so I'm not sure what happened or how. Any help would be great, thanks.

dstillman

Start here: Files Not Syncing

Most likely some of your files were simply never uploaded from the other computer — I believe were some situations in Zotero 4.0 where a file upload might not be properly retried if it initially failed. If you provide an example URL from your web library we might be able to say more.

bookster808

Thanks @dstillman . The issue is that my files were accessible online, I re-installed Windows on my PC (I said "new PC" above, but I actually just had to reinstalled Windows 10), and now they are not. I appreciate the "Files Not Syncing" link you shared, but I don't see this problem addressed on their (perhaps I am missing it).


As for providing "an example URL from [my] web library," will this suffice? It is a link to a PDF that is no longer accessible online or in Zotero 5: https://www.zotero.org/bookster808/items/itemKey/BU75HVW8

dstillman

The files almost certainly were never available online. Note that the items would've still shown up — they just wouldn't have had accessible files. The item in your example, for example, hasn't been modified on the server since February 2017 and has never had a file associated with it (unless you purged your storage online at some point, which would've cleared all file associations).

The linked page explains how to force Zotero on the other computer to upload all remaining files.