Problems after Firefox (and Zotero) has been reinstalled

torunw
I have zotero on my work computer, and some time ago the computer department decided to have all computers reinstalled, thus also Firefox - and Zotero - got reinstalled on my computer. I saved all data on an external disk, including the pdf-files connected to my zotero library, and put them back again after the reinstallation. I synced back the library, but now I can't open the attached files - they can't be found. Of course I could locate them all one by one, but I have about a 1000 sources and the catalogs where they are stored are not named according to the name of the attachment, they just have some kind of auto-generated generic names, so locating each manually would take weeks. But locating the files on the web and reattach them that way would take only slightly less time - what am I to do?

I realized that the name of the catalog in the zotero catalog where the pdf-files are stored was changed, so I made a copy of that catalog and renamed it with the old name, but that didn't help. Now what?

I'd be really grateful if someone knows a way of solving this issue!

Torun
  • adamsmith
    If you followed these instructions:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#restoring_your_zotero_library_from_a_backup
    your attachments would still be connected to the database. If you did something different we'd need to know what exactly to be sure, but most likely you're stuck.

    Note, though, that the files themselves likely have reasonable names (Zotero auto-renames them when you use translators) and you can display all of them in one folder using a saved search in your operating system (details depend on which OS you're using).
  • torunw
    Sounds like I'm pretty screwed... I followed the instructions, I checked now in the Zotero settings where it thinks it's going to find the files, and it is the place where they are so everything should have worked out fine, but somehow the link between them doesn't work anymore. :-( Not happy...
  • adamsmith
    provide a debug ID for trying to open a file.
    http://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output
  • fbennett
    I realized that the name of the catalog in the zotero catalog where the pdf-files are stored was changed, so I made a copy of that catalog and renamed it with the old name, but that didn't help.
    I'm not sure what you mean by "catalog" and "zotero catalog"? What are the old and new names?
  • torunw
    Yeah, that wasn't very clearly expressed - and not correct either... the catalog name that was changed was the name of the profile catalog - from z9...etc.default to pg...etc.default (I hadn't seen any need for multiple profiles, thus default seem fine with me) - and the profile catalogs are of course not located in the catalog named zotero, they are in the catalog named Profiles. But I assumed that the reason zotero couldn't find the files was that the name had changed, and made a copy of the pg...-catalog and renamed with the z9... name. But if I check the settings in zotero, under Preferences, Advanced, Show Data Directory, the path leads to the Firefox\Profiles\pg...\zotero\storage-catalog, which means that that can't be the problem, that's where the pdf-files ended up in the first place. So they are where zotero is looking, somehow it seems that zotero - just like me unless I open each file - can't find its way around there.
  • adamsmith
    "catalog" is not the English word you're looking for - you mean "folder". I did understand that, though.
    See my post above fbennett's for the next step.
  • torunw
    edited September 20, 2012
    You're right, it's folders I'm talking about. Anyhow, I've solved the problem. I realized that though I could see the folders with the attached pdfs in the storage-folder, there were only 57 folders there, and that couldn't be right when there were over a 1000 sources in my library. So I checked my backup on the external disk and found that in that version there were over 2000 items in that folder. So I copied them to the profile-folder and voila, it worked. Thus something must have interupted the copying to that folder, and some file telling what is what must have been missing. I'm very, very relieved over not having to redo everything again, and happy that I had a good backup! Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions!

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