Linked attachment base directory not working on Linux

jdien

I am using Zotero 5.0.95 on an Ubuntu Linux 20.10 computer and an OS X 10.15.7 computer, with the attachments in a Dropbox folder, with both copies of Zotero set to use Linked attachment base directory. The OS X Zotero is working fine. The Linux Zotero can't find the files because it continues to look in /home/jdien/Zotero/storage/ even though the setting is to look in /home/jdien/Dropbox/Bookends/Attachments. I tried temporarily changing the setting on the Linux computer to absolute and then back again to relative but it still isn't working. Any suggestions?

dstillman

Files in 'storage' are stored files, not linked files. The Linked Attachment Base Directory doesn't apply to those in any way.

jdien

I see! When I add new files I always use the "Attach Link to File" command so I'm using links, but these must have been from when I first imported the database into Zotero. I thought that when I activated this option, that all my existing stored files would be converted over to linking. Is there some way to mass migrate them to linked files or am I going to have to do it manually for each and every file (hundreds)? I did a search and found some references to zotfile being able to do this, so I installed it and set its File Location preference to the Dropbox folder. Then, following some comments in the forum, I selected the entire database, right-clicked and chose Manage attachments > rename attachments (because apparently that is the only way to move the files). It did successfully convert the files from storage to linked but it also indeed renamed the files, which I did not want to happen. So now my database is mucked up! Is it possible to undo all this? And somehow mass convert the attachments without renaming everything? The documentation for zotfile itself is pretty minimal. I'm very unhappy with all this.

dstillman

If you've already synced, you'd have to restore from a backup of your Zotero data directory from before you did that and then overwrite your online library.

I assume you can configure ZotFile's renaming, but you'd have to look through the settings. For what it's worth, while we know people have their preferred workflows, we pretty strongly recommend not bothering with manual renaming and just allowing either Zotero or ZotFile to rename the file based on the parent metadata. It's just something a computer can do pretty well, and ZotFile in particular gives you extremely fine-grained control over the naming scheme.

jdien

okay! thanks for your quick and informative responses!