All attachements lost after Firefox connector install

frank_meyer · October 17, 2019

Dear all,

I use Zotero for keeping track of publications in Physics/Electrical Engineering that I need in daily scientific work. Usually I attach those publications as PDFs to the entries in my Library. I am now experiencing the sudden problem, that I cannot locate those attachements anymore. They are still shown in both the Zotero client and the web interface, however when I click on them I get

"Attached file could not be found. It may have been moved or deleted."

When I click "locate" it directs me to the correct folder, for example "C:/users/myuser/Zotero/storage/2TYR7M68", but the file is indeed no longer there.
This has been the case since I installed the connector app for firefox a few days ago. As far as I can tell all files attached prior to installing it are gone. Files I added since are accessible.

I am on windows 8.1 64-bit with Zotero 5.0.76. I do not sync files between different machines.
I didn't find any thread that covers this exact problem so far. Any help will be appreciated.

Best,
Frank

dstillman · October 17, 2019

This has been the case since I installed the connector app for firefox a few days ago.

Do you mean by this that you upgraded from the old Zotero 4 for Firefox (which was discontinued two years ago) to the Zotero Connector, and then installed the separate Zotero 5 app? Because just installing the Zotero Connector otherwise wouldn't have anything to do with your data in the Zotero app.

If you did just upgrade from Zotero 4, see Data Missing After Zotero 5 Upgrade.

If you've been using Zotero 5 all along, this wouldn't be related to installing the Zotero Connector, as I say, but it's possible you did something else to cause Zotero to be pointed at the wrong data directory. In that case, see Locating Missing Zotero Data.

frank_meyer · October 18, 2019

Dear dstillman,

thanks for your comment. I did not upgrade to Zotero 5. Actually, I formatted my PC three weeks ago. After, I installed Zotero 5 directly and just got my files back by letting it sync with the server, which worked fine. Luckily, I also made a backup of my 'Zotero' folder on an external HD, so I still have most of my files backed up and could restore them. Nevertheless, I would like to understand what happened.
I followed the links you provided and located alternative 'Zotero' directories, none of which contained a 'storage' folder. I then ran a machine wide search for other possible 'Zotero' folders. The ones I found did not contain any 'storage' folders that would contain the missing attachments. To really make sure the missing files aren't somewhere on my PC I ran a search for some of the pdf file names that I have backed up on my external HD. Again without success. So this is not a problem of the path pointing at the wrong directory, the files are actually missing.
I don't know if this is connected to installing the connector, however this is the only thing I conciously did during the last days with Zotero, except for just adding a few entries to my library.
One thing that just came to my mind: Is it possibly this is related to my storage capacity in some way? I'm on the free plan and quite frankly didn't keep track of wether I was within the 300MB. It is quite possible that I wasn't. Would it be conceivable that my storage space was overflown and my library somehow got purged?

Best,
Frank

dstillman · October 18, 2019

OK, then it's extremely likely that what happened is that the files never actually uploaded to your online library before you formatted your computer, so when you wiped your hard drive and synced, the files added earlier — or at least some of them — weren't restored. And you likely simply didn't notice until around the time you installed the Zotero Connector, which, again, just wouldn't have been related to this at all. There's no way for files to just disappear unless they're deleted outside of Zotero, so this is almost certainly what happened.

As for why the files never uploaded, that's harder to say. File syncing might have been disabled, you might have been getting some sort of file sync error, or you might have been at your quota, which also results in a warning at sync time. (You're not currently at your quota, so it's probably not the last one unless you recently deleted some files or deleted a group that you were the owner of.)

frank_meyer · October 18, 2019

I'm a little unsure now, but I am fairly certain I checked, that the files have been synchronized properly after I had set up Zotero again. I'm also 90% sure I worked with zotero in the meantime and used it to open some papers without any problems. Anyway, I restored all the files with the backup I had made. They are actually 800MB large, which means I've been overusing my free space for a while without noticing. I switched to WebDAV now so I don't run into storage issues.

dstillman · October 18, 2019

They are actually 800MB large, which means I've been overusing my free space for a while without noticing.

Again, the quota only applies to file syncing, so it's not really a question of "overusing" your space unless you actually want to use file syncing. Local storage is unlimited.

Local files do take up more room than they do online, but if you're at more than 2x the quota, then pretty much by definition your files weren't fully synced, and what I described above is what happened.

In the future, I'd strongly recommend making a proper backup of your Zotero data directory (and, really, your entire computer) before wiping your computer rather than simply restoring from the cloud. (That applies to pretty much any sync system. Inefficiency of a remote restore aside, it's always possible that, due to a misconfiguration or error, the cloud version isn't the same as what you were using locally previously.)