Sync Error — too long to sync

I have been using Zotero with WebDAV and as I understood, the notes and meta is synced with the Zotero while the PDFs would be synced with webDAV. But everytime when I try to sync, I get the files synced properly but the annotations/notes extracted out of docs by native zotero method fails to sync with an error:

```
The note “Annotations (1/23/2022, 10:11:55 PM)” is too long to sync. Shorten the note and sync again.
```

What are we supposed to do? Can't we keep long notes in Zotero? And whether we can sync them to webDAV if not to zotero.

Please help, I am a new user and already transferred my library into Zotero ("Stored as a file")
  • Nothing to do with WebDAV. All data syncs to Zotero servers.

    Roughly how many PDF annotations did you add to the note?

    Can you provide a Debug ID for a sync that causes this?
  • Thats what I figured. There was only one note, across the whole collection. I didnt get any code.The whole error is what I posted above
  • I linked to instructions for providing a Debug ID. We can't help you without that.
  • My bad.
    Here is the code.

    D49607783
  • How many PDF annotations did you add to the note?
  • edited January 28, 2022
    Only one. I had just extracted one PDF into one note. That's it.
    And only one such note in the whole library. :D

    PS. Sorry for the late reply, I had replied somewhere, no idea why it isn't visible here. (or at least I thought I had, no clue).
  • That’s not my question. I’m asking how many annotations you’re adding, not how many PDFs.
  • >> That’s not my question. I’m asking how many annotations you’re adding, not how many PDFs.

    My experience shows that annotations that amount to about 80-90k characters make the note files too large for syncing (before the new file format it was 250k characters).

    The use case that creates such large notes is extracting many annotations from long scientific books. But, in this case, 80-90k is frequently surpassed, that is why I had to stick to zotfile for extractions and not use the new internal workflow for annotations. 80k characters may still seem long, but as a large part of characters/size is used for links, it is a serious limitation if you tend to highlight a lot and read lengthy books.

    See https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/94128/zotfile-no-option-to-extract-annotations#latest
  • @dstillman
    >> That’s not my question. I’m asking how many annotations you’re adding, not how many PDFs.

    That is what I said, only one note in total! That is it :)
  • edited January 29, 2022
    No, you're still misunderstanding the question.

    An "annotation" is not the same as a "note". An annotation is the individual highlight, sticky-note, or image you add to a PDF — you can see them all listed in the annotations sidebar on the left side of the PDF. You don't have one of them. You have probably hundreds or thousands of them to get this error. I'm asking approximately how many you have.
  • @dummifiedme: OK, I was able to figure it out based on your debug output. The answer is that you have >900 non-ink annotations for this attachment, across 55 or so pages.

    We'll see what we can do to better support adding so many annotations to a note.
  • oh, I am sorry. My bad.
    Yes they might be a lot :)
  • edited February 2, 2022
    We've increased the note length limit. Let us know if you run into any further problems.
    My experience shows that annotations that amount to about 80-90k characters make the note files too large for syncing (before the new file format it was 250k characters).
    Just to note, this is not true. Zotero notes were and still are serialized as HTML, and ZotFile annotations used HTML as well, so you never got 250K of text. The new annotations simply embed additional metadata in the HTML to enable some new advanced features.
Sign In or Register to comment.