PDF attachements of items are missing

IsaakM
I often encounter problems, where the PDF attachments to an entry (item) are missing. I get a message: the attachement could not be found.

I'm pretty sure that these PDF attachments were there at some point. How can they be gone?

Is it possible that some of the PDFs (eg ebooks) downloaded from university library catalogues are only temporarily usable and then delete themselves after some time? What could be other reasons for their disappearance?

I added an item for a very essential and important textbook and manually downloaded each and every chapter as an PDF attachment. Now almost all of these PDFs, except for the first chapter, are missing.

What would be an explaination for that? I encountered the problem with other PDF attachments as well. It almost feels like a lucky numbers game, whether PDF attachments will be there or will be gone, especially for PDFs that I haven't used in a while.
  • adamsmith
    Zotero will never touch your files. I could see that digital rights management (DRM) would do something to ebooks (though definitely not articles) after a given amount of time; that wouldn't be unlikely for textbook chapters and Zotero can't do anything about that. I'd have expected them to display a message instead of removing the file, but DRM is dark & evil arts, so who knows...
  • dstillman
    edited February 5, 2018
    @IsaakM: Also note that it's usually the case that the files simply were never on this computer and that you created and/or downloaded them on another computer and they haven't synced.
  • dstillman
    (You could also be using a different Zotero data directory from the one you were using previously on this computer — though in that case you'd have ended up with an empty database that you then synced down from the online library.)
  • IsaakM
    @adamsmith
    Yes, those were chapters from an ebook, downloaded from De Gruyter via my university account.

    @dstillman
    I'm not certain, I might have downloaded these files into Zotero with another computer. If I use the computer B and I do the syncing to WebDAV, they should be available on computer A as well, once computer A has synced, right?
  • adamsmith
    If I use the computer B and I do the syncing to WebDAV, they should be available on computer A as well, once computer A has synced, right?
    If syncing worked, yes, but you'd want to test that's actually the case: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/files_not_syncing
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