File path pains

drvjburton
Hello,
I use Zotero on both my work and home laptops, and recently had to move my PDFs from my hard drive to SharePoint storage due to work-imposed restrictions. I must have made a mess doing this as it has broken file paths and I get many 'The attached file could not be found at the following path: ...' messages now. I long ago met my sync limit. Is there any way out of this mess? What is best practice for managing storage? I can't really pay for more.

Thanks for any advice!

Victoria
  • dstillman
    edited yesterday at 4:55am
    (Just to clarify, the "best practice" would be using Zotero Storage. While someone from the community might be willing to walk you through debugging problems with linked files, that's an advanced configuration, and we specifically aren't able to troubleshoot problems with such setups.)
  • tim820
    edited yesterday at 6:33am
    Usually the clue to fixing linked file path issues is in the error message - where Zotero thinks the file should be - compared to where the file actually is now. If the problem is simple, setting a Linked Attachment Base Directory on all your computers should solve it. But don't do that until you understand the exact nature of the path problem.

    Your Zotero online file storage quota is irrelevant to linked files, as linked files can't be synced by Zotero. And data syncing is free and unlimited. So the actual file paths to linked PDFs - which are stored in that data - can always be fully synced across computers.

  • drvjburton
    Ok, so I have been following the error message which is still on my C drive, and updating them manually, which is tedious, I naively assumed it would automatically update them, like my previous software. I will look into how to update the paths. File paths are the bane of my life it seems.

    Thanks for clarification on storage Vs linked. Wish I could afford to store them with Zotero, sadly they have to go on SharePoint.
  • tim820
    There is almost never a reason to update many file paths manually.

    What is the file path listed in one of the error messages now ? And what is the actual path to that file ?
  • drvjburton
    For example,

    The attached file could not be found at the following path:

    C:\Users\victb\Zotero\storage\TUFZBV7V\Jensen et al. - 2025 - .pdf

    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.


    Actual:
    C:\Users\victb\Natural History Museum\Victoria's literature - Documents\Literature\storage\TUFZBV7V

    The file path on my other laptop will have a different username though.

    I didn't realise that Zotero creates a folder called storage, I had been keeping a PDFs in folders per journal in C:\Users\victb\Natural History Museum\Victoria's literature - Documents\Literature\ as per my previous software Mendeley

    Oh dear what a mess.
    Perhaps I should start over.
  • tim820
    edited yesterday at 5:05pm
    So Zotero must have initially stored that PDF at C:\Users\victb\Zotero\storage\TUFZBV7V\Jensen et al. - 2025 - .pdf. Because that's how Zotero recorded its location. And Zotero still thinks it is there.

    And that is a 'stored' file (not a 'linked' file) - as shown by the path being Zotero\storage, followed by an arbitrarily named folder (TUFZBV7V) that Zotero created for that particular PDF. So as it stands, I am not sure now that you have 'linked' PDFs. You would have had to have done something to convert stored files to linked files, and I am not seeing where you did that. Broken file links do occur most often with linked files. But we may have jumped to that assumption prematurely.

    How exactly did the PDF - that must have once been in the above TUFZBV7V folder - come to no longer be at that location, but instead now be physically located where you say it is now ?: C:\Users\victb\Natural History Museum\Victoria's literature - Documents\Literature\storage\TUFZBV7V\Jensen et al. - 2025 - .pdf
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