Upgrade StoragePDFs not syncing
dstillman
Zotero Team
This discussion was created from comments split from: Grayed out PDFs in web library.
Since you were just very helpful with another question, and I saw someone else was having the same problem of PDFs greyed out, I figured I would also chime in. My problem is I'm using two computers, one at home and one at work (university where I can connect via Remote Desktop and see what's going on). The one at home (where I installed Zotero first) has all the PDFs nice and sharp, but the work computer (which I synced later) shows that PDFs greyed out. After a bit, I also figured the problem was in the quota, so I started deleting duplicates. I am migrating from a HUGE Mendeley library (18,000 records) that is FULL of duplicates (I'd say each record has an average of 3-5 duplicates), so this is taking a while. I'm now doing it alphabetically and down at "D". However, by now I would have expected to see quite a bit of space freed up on the server and the sync started to work (lighting up the PDFs at work), but I only see 20 or so PDFs, out of thousands of records). When I press "Sync" at work, nothing happens. Does that mean that I'm still over quota and that I simply need to keep deleting records? If so, please do reassure me that I'm on the right track, as the record-by-record deletion is very slow (my fault for having such a huge library!). Thanks again dstillman!
Yes, you're just at your quota. That's not something you need to ask us: you can see it on your storage settings page, and you'll see an error about it on every sync on the computer that still has files to upload.
For freeing up space, a few things:
1) If you have duplicates, you can use the Duplicate Items view to merge them.
2) You have to actually empty the trash after merging/deleting the items.
3) The online quota has no bearing on how much you might have locally.
1. online at https://www.zotero.org/settings/storage
2. When you sync the computer holding the actual attachments (you'd get a sync error message)
Note that if you are using the free account, you'd *at best* sync 500 PDFs, i.e. less than 5% of your library given what you describe. If some of the PDFs are large, it could easily be as few as 50-60. If you want PDFs synced, I'd recommend either paying for storage or finding a WebDAV server that works for you: there's no way you'll get anywhere close to syncing your files just by removing duplicates.
Stored files in groups only count towards the storage quota of the group's owner, so the maximum total annual costs for a large group (or, for that matter, multiple large groups) that you manage is US$120.
If that's prohibitively expensive (and I understand it might be depending on location & circumstances), I'm afraid file syncing for groups is just not an option for you. Most other things in Zotero can be done with 3rd party solutions which may be cheaper or free; group storage cannot.