There are files in different folders

mba

There are no duplicated files in my zotero, but there are several copies of the same file stored in different folders (created and named by Zotero).
Are they created because I put them in more than one collection?
If not, should I delete some of them?
As I highlight the texts, I am not sure how of them I should delete.
If I leave them there, there is the risk I highlight different texts.
Have someone had the same problem?
Many thanks!

dstillman

Are you referring to the 'storage' folder in the Zotero data directory? You should pretty much never make manual changes to that directory.

There'd be multiple versions if you copied items with attachments between libraries. If you just have an item in multiple collections in the same library, there's only one copy of the item and therefore only one attached file.

If you see multiple copies of the item in the library root, then you have multiple copies and should merge those and delete the extraneous attachments — but that all happens within Zotero.

If I leave them there, there is the risk I highlight different texts.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. As long as you're accessing things through Zotero, you won't be opening different versions. But again, if you have multiple copies of the item in Zotero, you'd obviously want to deal with that.

If you're sure you only have one copy of the item in your database, it's possible you have some orphaned files in your 'storage' directory. Unless disk space is a problem, I'd recommend just ignoring those for now. Zotero might gain a feature to clean up orphaned files (which shouldn't ever happen, but could if an import was interrupted or something like that) at some point. But if you really wanted to delete things, you'd want to search for the 8-character folder name from the Zotero search bar in All Fields & Tags mode while in the library root.

mba

Thank you for you reply!

Not sure I was clear, let give you an example:

I open my Zotero, click on "My library" (the most general collection) and search the word "mechanical". So, the results are:

Mechanical Mind cap 1 part 2.pdf
C:\Users\Microsoft\Zotero\storage\4WXPRG87

Mechanical Mind cap 1 part 2.pdf
C:\Users\Microsoft\Zotero\storage\8PK8LNIP

As you can see, I have two instances of the same file stored in two different Zotero´s directories. You are correct, they are attachements.

dstillman

See my post above. It sounds like you just created multiple Zotero items for some reason. This doesn't really have anything to do with the 'storage' folder — that's not something you should pay attention to or touch. If you don't want duplicate items in Zotero, merge them and delete the attachment item in Zotero.