Mendeley import hangs

dstillman

This discussion was created from comments split from: Zotero beta hangs importing 6GB Mendeley library.

peter-zot-refs

I am also finding that my direct import from Mendeley does not work. I have submitted the output from an ongoing import: D911846115. I have tried several times, including leaving it to run for 15 hours, but the progress bar stops each time and it never completes.

I am using Zotero 6.0.3. I have also tried with the latest beta and get the same problem.

peter-zot-refs

D1300182933

I have tried to import again and again the process hangs. It has run for 24 hours + and still only a fraction of my Mendeley references are imported. I have submitted the log from a short, still-running, re-run import: D1300182933. There appears to be a problem with annotations. Is it possible to import and omit all of the annotations to avoid this problem? I do not want or need them.

Please advise.

dstillman

Is it possible you have hundreds of thousands of annotations?

The import has to import those in batches of 200 from the Mendeley servers, and it looks like that's what it's doing. But it's made over 1700 requests, which works out to over 340,000 annotations…

peter-zot-refs

Hi,

I certainly have not made hundreds of thousands of annotations. I have only ever made a few, and none for several years. However, it is possible that the mendeley library is corrupt, as it does not show any of the old annotations.

peter-zot-refs

D1114651674

As you can see, the import just seems to go on and on trying to retrieve (non-existant) annotations.

KK777

I attempted to import my Mendeley library over the weekend. Unfortunately a grand total of zero files were imported after many many hours of leaving the importer doing its thing. The entire folder structure was nicely recreated within Zotero, but with zero files within. I have hardly any annotations but I have a huge PDF library. It looked as though the progress bar was moving (albeit very slowly), but nothing at all came across except empty folders. I reinstalled Zotero desktop for a fresh start and weirdly, all the folders were still there and I had to manually delete the empty collections.

dstillman

@KK777: We'd need to see a Debug ID for an hour of the import attempt.

dstillman

@peter-zot-refs: Do you see any annotations if you look at your library online? As far as we can tell from the debug output, the Mendeley servers are claiming that these annotations exist.

It's a bit more annoying thanks to Mendeley's database encryption, but you can try the alternative method for importing your library.

peter-zot-refs

I installed Mendeley desktop 1.18 and imported from there, it worked ok except that all those pdfs which Mendeley keeps online and downloads when used were not imported. I could not fathom how to make Mendeley download them all to the desktop and there are too many to force downloads by opening them all individually. So I installed an earlier version of Mendeley v.1.17 which automatically synch'ed all the pdfs locally. The import from v 1.17 worked, with all the pdfs.

Here is a link to a screenshot from the desktop version (v1.18), and you can see from the bottom, synching, line that there's clearly a problem with the annotations:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aj9K4kTEVGqZh-dNaiMHHcyT7C-YmA.

Thank you very much for your help.