Impossible to locate attached and stored files
(Report ID: 83552514)
Since more or less a month I am experiencing troubles with both attached and stored files that cannot be located. At first I thought it was because my storage was full, so today I changed my plan to have more GB. Then I syncronised my library, but nothing has changed yet.
Steps to reproduce:
1. open Zotero;
2. sync with Zotero.org;
3. attempt to open file;
4. report error: "File not found. The attached file could not be found at the following path (name of the path). It may have been moved or deleted outside of Zotero, or, if the file was added on another computer, it may not yet have been synced to zotero.org."
I am sure the files have not been removed or added on other computers, and I have also checked that the directory is correct (it should be).
Since more or less a month I am experiencing troubles with both attached and stored files that cannot be located. At first I thought it was because my storage was full, so today I changed my plan to have more GB. Then I syncronised my library, but nothing has changed yet.
Steps to reproduce:
1. open Zotero;
2. sync with Zotero.org;
3. attempt to open file;
4. report error: "File not found. The attached file could not be found at the following path (name of the path). It may have been moved or deleted outside of Zotero, or, if the file was added on another computer, it may not yet have been synced to zotero.org."
I am sure the files have not been removed or added on other computers, and I have also checked that the directory is correct (it should be).
I have just checked my online library and the files are not there either... But they are on my computer, which is the one that I have synced. Shouldn't it be possible to upload the files now that the quota has changed?
Can you provide a Debug ID for trying to open the file?
This is the Debug ID for trying to open a stored file: D778636966
And this is the Debug ID for trying to open an attached file: D1168218235
Thanks.
Do you maybe have an idea of how I ended up in this situation if until a month ago everything was working properly and I did not move anything? (I am asking this in order to avoid future mistakes -- I have been using Zotero for years now and nothing like this has ever happened before).
For stored files — within your data directory — the problem is almost certainly that you added the file on another computer that hasn't yet synced since you increased your storage. The only other possibility would be that you moved a file out of the data directory yourself, outside of Zotero.
For linked files, you either added them on a different computer where the files are at a different path or you moved them outside of Zotero on this computer.
For stored files, if you didn't move files out of the data directory manually, you would just need to sync all your computers now that you've increased your quota. You can also relocate, which will just copy the file into the correct folder in the data directory, but that's not really the proper fix.
For linked files, you just don't have Zotero pointing at the current locations. One of the paths you showed just has another folder in the middle of the path. Another screenshot shows a folder in an exported library from Zotero, with numbered folders under 'files', which is definitely not somewhere that you would want to be using as a permanent location for files.
But this is all just stuff you did on your computer, so it's really just something you're going to have to clean up.
The best way to avoid this in the future is just to always use stored files, which are managed by Zotero. As long as you have enough storage space and you're syncing, you'll have the same files on all computers and will never accidentally unlink them by moving them around your filesystem as you did here.