broken attachments

Hi

I'm sure there have been plenty of discussions on the issue of broken attachments and how to fix them; but I couldn't find the exact case; so I would ask if you could advise on that or just point me to the right discussion or guide over the internet.

I confess that I never really understood the way Zotero manages attachments and why to use a Linked Attachment Base Directory, nor how do all these great utilities like zutilo or zotfile, etc. work; that's why I always sticked to the default behavior, keeping files in the storage directory under Zotero, with its absolute paths.

Now, for some reason I don't understand, (probably due to the need of moving my database and storage from one PC to a Mac ) I realize that I have more than 2,000 "broken attachments" (I used the the storage scanner add-on);

However, the "broken" attachments are not really broken, they are exactly in the folder they should, but they have a different name, that's why of course I get the "file not found " error message. e.g in the database the path is say:

/Users/Mike/Zotero/storage/XHEIEBJZ/2018_PasoI.pdf
while in reality it is as follow:
/Users/Mike/Zotero/storage/XHEIEBJZ/IFI10801.pdf

Now I can't really remember how could I have done that; the names I see do not follow any possible path or model so I don't really understand How it could happen. I don't remember having used batch functionalities of zotfile or so ; just renamed manually some files using the context menu "rename from parent metadata" so it can't be that.

Whatever the reason, I would like you could help me in fixing that: is there some batch utilities who can automatically fix the wrong path, without having to do it manually ? or point me to some easy guide on how to do that?

and for the future: is there some better way you would suggest to manage my attachments so to avoid this kind of problem (the linked base directory instead of the default storage maybe?) I always thought that sticking to the default would have been the best way.

Thanks for any advice.

Mike
  • Do you have Zotfile installed though? 2018_PasoI looks like something ZotFile would do and not particularly likely from Zotero (which defaults to ' - ' between elements for renaming)

    What this looks like to me is that something renamed the files in the database but for some reason didn't actually rename the file proper. I have no idea how that'd have happened nor have I seen this, I believe.

    There's no out of the box solution to fixing this, but there may be a scripting option.
  • thanks Adam, zotfile was installed at a certain point, but I don't remember having ever run batch renaming actions (don't even know if it does things like that ) ; then I had removed it; I reinstalled it now to see whether it provides some functions to fix my problem; but didn't do anything so far;.. I'm sorry to hear that there is no easy solution...
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