PDFs not showing up when needed under institutional subscription

lauren.withey
Hi there, I own many Group libraries under an institutional subscription with unlimited storage. I ended up with far too many PDFs on my hard drive and decided to change my settings to pull up Group Library PDFs "as needed" and delete the PDFs on my hard drive. However, since doing that, whenever I try to open a PDF from my Zotero app, I get a message that "The attached file could not be found at the following path." If I go online to access the file my browser version, it pops up. Is there some other setting or process I need to put in place to get the PDF to actually be pulled my hard drive "as needed" from the app? Thanks!
  • adamsmith
    No, that should just work. You're positive you can actually *open*, not just see, the file attachment online and that you're looking at the exact same item (not, say, a copy/different version)?

    If so, please provide a debug ID for trying to open such a file
    https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output#zotero
  • lauren.withey
    D1533152001
  • lauren.withey
    Well, mysteriously it seems to be working now, thankfully! There is one exception to this happy turn of events: files that were saved to our groups by someone who has now left the org. My app suggests that her citations have PDFs attached to them, but I get the "The attached file could not be found at the following path" when I try to pull them up, and the PDFs don't appear in my browser version. Might this have been caused by this user syncing files in a way that ended up removing them from the groups when her institutional profile and associated Zotero app ceased to exist? Why would my app show the existence of a PDF after syncing when this doesn't appear online? Thanks for any guidance you can provide.
  • adamsmith
    That means the files weren't synced up from the person who added them. They may have gotten a sync error, have file syncing disabled for groups, their sync may have predated the storage subscription -- impossible to say in retrospect.

    The existence of files -- i.e. file metadata -- is synced separately, so no mystery why they'd show up even if the files themselves aren't on the server.
  • lauren.withey
    Thank you! It was not the third issue, so I suspect a sync error or sync disabled for groups.
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