Error syncing
Report ID: 113957274
Zotero v5.0.87 standalone application on Ubuntu Focal 20.04 LTS.
Click on sync button, get the error
Component returned failure code: 0x80520008 (NS_ERROR_FILE_ALREADY_EXISTS) [nsIFile.create]
Zotero v5.0.87 standalone application on Ubuntu Focal 20.04 LTS.
Click on sync button, get the error
Component returned failure code: 0x80520008 (NS_ERROR_FILE_ALREADY_EXISTS) [nsIFile.create]
Zotero -> Edit -> Preferences, Advanced tab -> Files and Folders.
My Data Directory Location is pointing at ~/.zotero/zotero/jzz7ebwd.default/zotero, instead of the default ~/Zotero. Inside of that directory, storage was a broken soft link pointing at an unexisting location, instead of a directory.
Chaning the data directory location to "Default" would show a window saying that Zotero needs to be restarted, and to copy your data files to the new location before restarting. Then Zotero would shut down. Upon restarting, the data location would still point at ~/.zotero/zotero/jzz7ebwd.default/zotero.
The solution was to delete the broken soft link, and creating an empty storage directory.
However, I don't think I can recover much. It seems that my zotero installation was using
.zotero/zotero/jzz7ebwd.default/
However,
.zotero/zotero/jzz7ebwd.default/zotero/storage
was a broken soft link pointing to a directory that no longer exists (I must have deleted it when upgrading Ubuntu at some point in the past). I think this went on undetected because
1) despite the storage directory being missing (i.e. softlink pointing at nothing), there was no noticeable loss of functionality. Double-clicking on a reference in the Zotero app would open an online reference or sometimes a PDF locally, I don't know how. Also, my online Zotero library, when opening with the browser, showed the acccount quite full in terms of PDFs filling the storage space. I have been adding new references, and there was no problem. I did get errors adding new PDFs from the Chrome extension, but I thought that was because my account was full. (Which is why I was now trying to migrate to WebDAV).
2) Another reason why this went on undetected is because Zotero didn't give a plain clear error message, e.g. "storage directory missing". Instead, I got seemingly random errors when trying to export a library or the NS_ERROR_FILE_ALREADY_EXISTS when syncing.
I do have 396 directories in the old Zotero/storage directory (the one I moved to another location). They have names like
22U6P2RU 553SKG3C 8EDD9J8I ...
These contain 93 PDFs, and some look recent. So maybe, somehow my zotero desktop app was operating there, even though in the Preferences configuration it said it pointed to .zotero/zotero/jzz7ebwd.default/, and that couldn't be changed as described above.
So I assume that if I move the backup storage directories to ~/Zotero/storage, I'll have access to those PDFs, right?
Anyway, thanks for looking into it.