Upgrade StorageZotero Evangelist at Columbia U in desperate need of technical assistance.
The concise problem is in bold.
Hello: The Topic Title and the following content was originally sent in an email. Now that I have the proper venue, I will offer you some more details. The immediacy of the problem still applies.
COPY
Would someone be available to chat/skype with me to address some acute technical problems? My zotero library is crashing repeatedly with every addition of a citation, and I need it to hold up this month while I complete a number of Spring Term papers. I’ve searched for the error terms in your documentation and forums, and nothing’s matching. No errors are found in the database with an advanced screening in the preferences pane.
I have a number of configuration settings that will require some explaining. I’ve included the reference number and the results of the last error report I sent you. I could send you this report after every crash, but it essentially contains the same problems each time.
I am truly dependent on my database working correctly, and I’ve ground to a halt in the Literature Review of my latest project. I’d love to have this solved before I move into April. Please CC me and forward this request to the necessary parties.
Thank You so much,
James
END COPY
Now for a bit more background on the problem. A week ago I searched for any documentation on how to MOVE a database to a different saved location. There isn't any documentation on this particular demand. There are instructions and advice on best EXPORTing practices, and best BACKUP practices. But moving involves keeping a database along with attachments intact and having zotero save to a new location.
Backing up further. I currently have my zotero database saved to a mirror image of my apple idisk home folder. A bit of background on idisk, it's otherwise a FTP location, however it has a local idisk option which I've kept engaged successfully throughout my academic career. This means I have a local copy of my idisk sitting on my desktop, for when I don't have network, and when given the opportunity, this local drive image will save to the server. If you looked for the actual directory location of this local drive image, you'd find it in my local System Library>FileSync> and it would take the form of a .sparsebundle. Otherwise, I would direct my automated zotfile plug-in within firefox to direct my documents to the idisk. (Same problem with getting the local idisk to sync or backup to another folder, for example)
Because zotero and the idisk have their own schedule for updating, my idisk would end up causing conflicts when attempting to sync, specifically the zotero.sqlite file would not be updated to mobileme. I do have .sqlite.bak and -journal files in my citations folder which have not confused the sync process. I've turned on manual idisk sync about a week ago to avoid the conflict, but I've been concerned that any instability with idisk could cause inconsistencies with my zotero library. I've since attempted to move my database to a local folder.
When I tried to do this via a copy of my original citations folder, my zotero library was empty after linking it to the new location, and at best lost reference to all the attached documents. I've since leaned towards the "Attached Stored Copy of File" option in order to maintain my own folder structure. Furthermore, a zotero extension zotfile created by a colleague of mine, has been instrumental in renaming files and linking them as I ingest new research material into zotero.
Because the MOVE of the database was such a failure, I relinked my zotero to my original citations folder. Only now, zotero crashes, typically every time I associate a renamed file, whether I've manually renamed it or used zotfile, and attached a stored copy of the file. Frankly, zotfile has not been working properly. It is designed to not only rename the file based on the metadata in zotero, but also to move the item to an assigned documents folder, and furthermore to create the attachment between the citation and the stored copy of the file.
The following is the error report I've continually received. Thank you again for your attention.
Error Report ID: 1620927480
Hello: The Topic Title and the following content was originally sent in an email. Now that I have the proper venue, I will offer you some more details. The immediacy of the problem still applies.
COPY
Would someone be available to chat/skype with me to address some acute technical problems? My zotero library is crashing repeatedly with every addition of a citation, and I need it to hold up this month while I complete a number of Spring Term papers. I’ve searched for the error terms in your documentation and forums, and nothing’s matching. No errors are found in the database with an advanced screening in the preferences pane.
I have a number of configuration settings that will require some explaining. I’ve included the reference number and the results of the last error report I sent you. I could send you this report after every crash, but it essentially contains the same problems each time.
I am truly dependent on my database working correctly, and I’ve ground to a halt in the Literature Review of my latest project. I’d love to have this solved before I move into April. Please CC me and forward this request to the necessary parties.
Thank You so much,
James
END COPY
Now for a bit more background on the problem. A week ago I searched for any documentation on how to MOVE a database to a different saved location. There isn't any documentation on this particular demand. There are instructions and advice on best EXPORTing practices, and best BACKUP practices. But moving involves keeping a database along with attachments intact and having zotero save to a new location.
Backing up further. I currently have my zotero database saved to a mirror image of my apple idisk home folder. A bit of background on idisk, it's otherwise a FTP location, however it has a local idisk option which I've kept engaged successfully throughout my academic career. This means I have a local copy of my idisk sitting on my desktop, for when I don't have network, and when given the opportunity, this local drive image will save to the server. If you looked for the actual directory location of this local drive image, you'd find it in my local System Library>FileSync> and it would take the form of a .sparsebundle. Otherwise, I would direct my automated zotfile plug-in within firefox to direct my documents to the idisk. (Same problem with getting the local idisk to sync or backup to another folder, for example)
Because zotero and the idisk have their own schedule for updating, my idisk would end up causing conflicts when attempting to sync, specifically the zotero.sqlite file would not be updated to mobileme. I do have .sqlite.bak and -journal files in my citations folder which have not confused the sync process. I've turned on manual idisk sync about a week ago to avoid the conflict, but I've been concerned that any instability with idisk could cause inconsistencies with my zotero library. I've since attempted to move my database to a local folder.
When I tried to do this via a copy of my original citations folder, my zotero library was empty after linking it to the new location, and at best lost reference to all the attached documents. I've since leaned towards the "Attached Stored Copy of File" option in order to maintain my own folder structure. Furthermore, a zotero extension zotfile created by a colleague of mine, has been instrumental in renaming files and linking them as I ingest new research material into zotero.
Because the MOVE of the database was such a failure, I relinked my zotero to my original citations folder. Only now, zotero crashes, typically every time I associate a renamed file, whether I've manually renamed it or used zotfile, and attached a stored copy of the file. Frankly, zotfile has not been working properly. It is designed to not only rename the file based on the metadata in zotero, but also to move the item to an assigned documents folder, and furthermore to create the attachment between the citation and the stored copy of the file.
The following is the error report I've continually received. Thank you again for your attention.
Error Report ID: 1620927480
2) Disable extensions other than Zotero while you're troubleshooting. We don't support ZotFile.
3) I (and others) don't have time to read this whole thing, so you'll need to be a lot more concise.
http://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_bugs
I will disable zotfile and see if that helps. I couldn't really afford to troubleshoot this until my last slew of research was completed, and therefore I don't have too many papers to convert and link. However, zotero is already acting much more stable. Fingers crossed.
Zotero does not have any live, chat, or email support and the documentation has not covered my problem, so please appreciate that in explaining my case, I want to be as cooperative and thorough as I can be.
For starters, it would be really great if instructions on explicitly moving or migrating a database would be posted to the public documentation. None of the forum threads have reached a consensus on the best practices of this.
Cheers,
James
I appreciate your trying to provide more details, but Zotero developers and community members help dozens of people in these forums a day, generally quite efficiently, and we couldn't possibly do so if we had to read through 700-word posts each time.
Full error output frequently includes unrelated messages that produce false positives in searching and cause people to post in threads with completely unrelated issues. We'll usually excerpt a relevant error if there is one. From your report, it's not even yet clear which of the errors are related to the problem you're experiencing.
Disable your other extensions, restart Firefox, and try to reproduce the problem. If you do, immediately send in another Report ID, and then tell us the exact steps you took to reproduce it.
Mobileme likes to play hot potato with a lot of problems, and I've learned to be rather stubborn when it comes to getting all the facts from each shareholder technology (and many years of troubleshooting a post-prod studio reinforce this habit). Anyway, I'll post again if the problem rears its head. Otherwise, you can assume it's smooth sailing.
Cheers,
James
I recall ruling out the WebDav option when I realized that I would be organizing my files in a number of sub-folders. The only reason I'd dump every article into a single folder would be if the zotfile extension was still working to properly rename my articles and move them in place, or if the "Rename file from parent metadata" did not actually result in a new copy of a file in an automatically created folder. If I'm missing something, I would certainly welcome further incite.
If you use linked files, it will work only if the files are at the exact same path on the new system (unless you're using OS X, you dig into the database using an SQLite client, or directory-relative linked file functionality gets implemented). Linked files don't sync using Zotero Sync, either, so they have a number of disadvantages. There's not really much to it (and if you're using Zotero File Storage, there's nothing at all to configure), other than that linked files don't sync. What did you find confusing? Oh, you're saying that if you use that on a linked file, Zotero imports it? I guess that is the case, and it should be fixed. Ticket created.