Zotero library on iCloud, PDFs greyed out

rezmarch
Hi there,

Apologies if this has already been discussed, but couldn't find it anywhere. Hopefully someone has been in a similar situation and can help.

I am using macOS Mojave 10.14.2 . My Zotero Library is located in the Documents folder, syinced with iCloud. Some of the documents in the library have been uploaded to liberate space on the hard drive. When I try to open some of the PDFs associated to the entries on Zotero Standalone they won't open and this message pops up:

"The attached file could not be found.

It may have been moved or deleted outside of Zotero, or, if the file was added on another computer, it may not yet have been synced to zotero.org."

Once I click "locate" I am able to see the pdf, greyed out (uploaded to iCloud), but I am not able to open it. Clicking "Download now" won't work either.

I thought moving the library to the hard drive again would solve it, but iCloud seems to never completely download all the files, and therefore Finder blocks when I try to copy the folder.

Any ideas on how to sort this out? I am afraid I have corrupted the database...

Cheers,

Á
  • adamsmith
    My Zotero Library is located in the Documents folder, syinced with iCloud.
    What exactly do you mean by that? If you have your Zotero data folder on icloud, that will indeed corrupt your library. Just putting linked attachments there is fine, though.
  • dstillman
    There are two issues here:

    1) Your Zotero data directory absolutely shouldn't be in any cloud storage folder.

    2) Files in iCloud that haven't been downloaded require special handling. Zotero will automatically trigger downloading of those, but that only works for linked files, not stored files, because, again, the data directory shouldn't be in iCloud to begin with.
  • rezmarch
    Thanks for your answer.

    Yes, the entire Zotero data directory is on iCloud. I see the problem. Is there a way to sort it out and save the library and the attachments?
  • dstillman
    You'll first need to move your data directory out of iCloud, ideally back to the default location. If that's not working, that'd be a macOS issue, not a Zotero issue.

    You can then use the third-party ZotFile extension to convert your stored files to linked files stored in iCloud.
Sign In or Register to comment.