ReportID 433908410

After failed sync attempts with Zotero Standalone, per the moderator's suggestion I DLed the 5.0 beta. It synced for a while, but then stopped. It now displays this error message every time I try to sync.

Please advise. Thanks for your help.
  • Could you provide a Debug ID for a sync attempt that fails?
  • I still need a Debug ID. Follow the link for instructions.
  • These instructions: https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output in case that wasn't clear.
  • Sorry, I misunderstood. I followed your instructions. The Debug ID is D1676816778.
  • edited December 1, 2016
    Thanks — Could you upgrade to the latest beta version (r84) and provide another Debug ID from that? It won't fix the problem, but it will log some additional info to the debug output that might help us figure this out.
  • Thanks. I upgraded to the r84 beta version.

    Two things:
    1) it returned a different error when the auto sync began (New ReportID: 1817215846)
    2) The Debug ID is D5138959.
  • Thanks. Could you update to r85 and generate another Debug ID? (No need for another Report ID.)

    Unfortunately this might take a bit of back and forth to fix, so thanks for your patience. Alternatively, if you prefer, you can upload your database to the DB Repair Tool and provide the Upload ID, and we can take a look at your database to more quickly see what the problem is. If you do that, you should ignore the download links the tool provides, which won't work.
  • Dan -- pretty sure the DB is giant, which is why I recommended trying the beta. Will the repair tool work over 100MB?
  • I appreciate your help, and patience as well!

    I'm beginning to worry that Zotero sync just won't work for me, however, as each time we resolve one issue another comes up and the sync won't complete (For the record, my database is 20gb and 17775 items)

    Per your instructions, I upgraded to the latest version (r87) and...

    the good news: the sync continued, and made progress
    the bad news: now every few seconds it hangs up on a problematic "note" and displays an error message along the lines of the following...

    "Note '<p><!--StartFragment--><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helveti...' too long for item '3572609/7JBPSCVT'"

    The first five times this happened, I manually converted the few problematic notes into Word documents and deleted the original note. Alas, it seems these problematic notes are many, and I don't think I can realistically convert each and every one of these (compiled over 6 years of research) into a Word doc to bypass the error.

    Is there any way to force the server to accept the notes? It says they are "too long" but I'm not sure how that can be if anyone uses Zotero like I do. For example: The last three notes that Zotero sync hung up on as "too long" consisted of 1) two image files of a mere two pages of low dpi book text scans pasted into a note; 2) a 5-page HTML email pasted into a note; 3) three lines of text and a single low dpi image pasted into a note.

    I dont think any of these image files is more than a few hundred KB, if that. Why is it saying these notes are "too long"?

    I'm reporting the latest error as Report ID 958985448. The Debug ID is D144270496.

    Thanks for your help... I'm glad that we're making progress, and thank you for your patience. My hope is that once the first upload of my 20gb database to the server is complete daily updates will be problem-free. The database has accumulated over six years of academic research.
  • Yeah, that's not really a bug. You'll have to take the images out of the notes (or find a different note solution likea attached word or pdf docs or so).
    You can't paste images into notes at all unfortunately -- the notes are too long because of how the images are converted into text (also, I'd expect them to break -- i.e. disappear -- and I'm surprised they don't, to be honest). It's unfortunate that Zotero let's you paste images in the first place, but I don't think that'll change any time soon. That's also not a new thing, by the way -- this has been the case for years.
  • Well, that's good to know for future reference. I often copy and paste online web articles into notes so that I can highlight the text as needed (the alternative - turning everything into PDFs adds extra steps - both in creating the article as an attachment, annotating it, and then retrieving it later)

    Not all the problematic notes have images, though. Can you help me understand the issue with HTML (text-only) copied and pasted from websites or emails into Zotero notes? Why does it hang up on these?
  • My guess is that copying the html includes a whole bunch of html gibberish. Zotero notes are limited to something like 80,000 characters, which for regular writing is a small research paper, but once you copy over tons of mark-up, that may fill up quickly. You can look at your notes in HTML mode to tell.

    For annotating webpages -- obviously Zotero used to just allow that and it'd be nice to have that back (it had a number of problems, including the fact that it didn't sync, so there are good reason for the particular implementation to be discontinued). One thing to look at might be to annotate webpage snapshots with Hypothes.is. Might take some figuring out what a good workflow is, but otherwise that's very elegant, I think.
  • Thanks for the suggestions. Couldn't one possible (simple?) way to address this issue be to incorporate a "paste as text only" option into Zotero notes, much like what MS Word and other apps have been offering for a while? This would ensure that all the coding mess does not take up valuable character space (or mess up the sync). I would use this feature dozens of times a day, if given the opportunity!
  • yeah, that'd absolutely be a solution, but someone would have to implement it and I don't think there's currently a ton of work going into the note editor (which is third party code, so that's an additional barrier). One of the reasons is that I don't think people post rich text into these notes much. You're as far as I know the first person who has reported hitting this issue with anything other than a pasted image.
  • Since it looks like I cannot use Zotero sync with my database, is it by chance possible to request a cancellation and refund of my unlimited storage plan subscription?
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