New MacBook Air M1 - Entire library PDFs are not working

ksouf081

Hello, the PDFs for my entire library are "corrompu" (french word) whenever I try to open them up with PDF expert. I bought a new MacBook Air. Help please to retreive my PDFs?

thanks

dstillman

This doesn't really sound like a Zotero problem. Zotero simply saves files on disk.

Do the files open in Preview?

How did you get your library to this computer? By using Migration Assistant or by using Zotero syncing?

Can you open the PDFs in your web library?

ksouf081

Hello, thanks for your reply.

Do the files open in Preview? - no

How did you get your library to this computer? By using Migration Assistant or by using Zotero syncing? - Migration Assistant

Can you open the PDFs in your web library? yes

dstillman

Do you still have access to the old computer? If so, are you able to open the files there?

This just sounds like files were corrupted while being transferred to this computer, unless this happens on the old computer as well. (I've never heard of Migration Assistant doing this, though.)

If your files are all online, you can just search for all PDFs within your Zotero data directory in Finder and delete them, and Zotero will redownload them. But there's no reason this should be limited to Zotero files or PDFs, so if lots of your files are corrupted, that'd be a more general concern and you may want to test the old computer and, if it's OK, re-try the transfer.

ksouf081

Hello, yes it still works on my old computer.

dstillman

OK, so this wouldn't have anything to do with Zotero. I would make a backup of any new data on this computer, erase it, and redo the Migration Assistant transfer. If you're still having trouble with corrupted files after that, you should take the computer to an Apple Store. (Don't bother mentioning Zotero, which is irrelevant. These are just PDFs on disk, which you should be able to open outside of Zotero.)