relink PDF files to library

aadje
Dear all, I am an absolute idiot. But here is the situation I am in: I have about 1800 items in my library and 1800 folders in my "storage" folders. But somehow they are no longer linked. Now I seem to have a made a clone because I had two storage folders (?!?!?) and simply merged the two. Now I have all my folders in the one storage. I have directed Zotero to the folder as being my base directory, but it still can not find the PDF fiels.
When I want to open a pdf i get the message Zotero can not find it....
How can I relink the folders to my library?
I ran through some discussions, but cant find an answer, at least not one I understand.
Hope somebody can help me out.
  • dstillman
    OK, first, the base directory is something else entirely — that applies to linked files — so unset that.

    It's not really clear what you did here, but if you provide a Debug ID for an attempt to open a file that's missing we should be able to tell you more.
  • aadje
    Thank you, the Debug ID is D1951883108.
    not really clear what i did either...
  • dstillman
    /Users/[…]/Library/Application Support/Zotero/Profiles/8gs62vwy.default/storage/storage/MK3NVBR7/R[…].pdf
    OK, so you appear to have created a directory named 'storage' in your Zotero profile directory and set that as your data directory. Then within that there's the normal 'storage' directory that's present in every data directory.

    In Zotero 5, the default directory location is /Users/:username:/Zotero, so I would suggest closing Zotero and moving your files there. You'll need the zotero.sqlite file and a 'storage' directory containing your attachment directories.

    If you then move the current data directory out of the way, when you next start Zotero and the custom data directory is missing it will prompt you to use the default location.
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