So basically I had to replace my computer and none of my previous files are accessible. I had Zotero data syncing on so I have all the meta data back no issue. I did not have file syncing turned on, so now all my pdfs say file not found when trying to open them.

I have an older storage of a lot (but not all) of the pdfs, but they are not in the correct Zotero directory locations (just all in one folder), and I'm pretty sure I had Zotero change the names previously so they may not even be named the same thing.

I'm guessing my only recourse here is to just add all the files again like they are new things (drag and drop into zotero), and then just deal with cleaning up all the duplicates that get created. But I figured I would ask if there is a cleaner way of rebuilding the file associations (it's hundreds of files, so I won't be doing "locate file" for each one).

A lot of the files came from Mendeley, which did have file syncing, so I can re-import the Mendeley library if that's useful, but I figured that would just create duplicates the same way dropping the files in would so I wasn't sure if that's any better. I'd like to avoid wiping Zotero and doing a fresh import of Mendeley since there's many files I've added after I switched that are in the Zotero library but not Mendeley (even if they now don't have files).

Maybe it would be useful to hid the library file, re-import Mendeley and have Zotero rename, then replace the library file and hope everything got put into the same file structure?