Upgrade Storagereferences to openoffice document lost
Hi all you Zotero Gurus,
my daughter has a large doc with about 150 references to bibliographic entries.
She works under windows XP SP3, with openoffice and firefox.
Then sudedenly windows started to behave weird and finally her desktop changed permanently for the standard desktop and equally her settings in firefox were lost.
I managed to restore the desktop and the firefox settings and everything seemd to be all right until she continued work on her doc.
some references she could not edit any more, entering new refs took longer and longer until the whole thing stopped work alltogether (no more entry of references possible).
As not much could become worse I exported all entries in Zotero, erased the bibliographic entries and re-imported the data.
I was apalled when I saw that the data wer re-imported into a new group with the current date!
By drag-and-drop I managed to get the data back into the right group but it was all in vain, all references in the openoffice doc were lost.
Now my questions:
By using drag-and-grop to copy the data to the original group are the data really copied or do I produce a "link" only and the actual data remain at their original location?
Is there any possibility to edit the "links" in the OO doc which point to the bibliographic data in Zotero (in the firefox directory) or
is there any tool to extract these links (e.g. in txt-form), edit them (e.g. to point to the right directory in firefox) and integrate them back into the OO doc? (this way repairing broken links)
My daughter had no other choice than to erase all 150 eferences and enter them anew.
In this context:
is it normal that the process of entering a reference into a doc slows down more and more with the number of references growing? Or is this announcing the next "beravement" ? The comp of my daughter isn't one of the fastest! (Laptop with 1,5 GHz CPU)
Thanks for all help and good tips!
Peter
my daughter has a large doc with about 150 references to bibliographic entries.
She works under windows XP SP3, with openoffice and firefox.
Then sudedenly windows started to behave weird and finally her desktop changed permanently for the standard desktop and equally her settings in firefox were lost.
I managed to restore the desktop and the firefox settings and everything seemd to be all right until she continued work on her doc.
some references she could not edit any more, entering new refs took longer and longer until the whole thing stopped work alltogether (no more entry of references possible).
As not much could become worse I exported all entries in Zotero, erased the bibliographic entries and re-imported the data.
I was apalled when I saw that the data wer re-imported into a new group with the current date!
By drag-and-drop I managed to get the data back into the right group but it was all in vain, all references in the openoffice doc were lost.
Now my questions:
By using drag-and-grop to copy the data to the original group are the data really copied or do I produce a "link" only and the actual data remain at their original location?
Is there any possibility to edit the "links" in the OO doc which point to the bibliographic data in Zotero (in the firefox directory) or
is there any tool to extract these links (e.g. in txt-form), edit them (e.g. to point to the right directory in firefox) and integrate them back into the OO doc? (this way repairing broken links)
My daughter had no other choice than to erase all 150 eferences and enter them anew.
In this context:
is it normal that the process of entering a reference into a doc slows down more and more with the number of references growing? Or is this announcing the next "beravement" ? The comp of my daughter isn't one of the fastest! (Laptop with 1,5 GHz CPU)
Thanks for all help and good tips!
Peter
This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Instead of commenting here, you should start a new discussion. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.
Import / export is not the way to back up zotero data - it breaks the referencing in documents as you found. See here:
http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data
for how to do it, personally I use sync and the occasional backup and so far, data has been fine.
As for your laptop - well, if it's a single core 1.5Ghz (and I guess, what six or seven years old?), then yes, that's pretty slow, but the major factor will be how much RAM you've got. You want something like a Gig to run Windows XP smoothly. Less could also be slowing things down.
Some slowdowns in Word/OpenOffice can be avoided by inserting the bibliography when you've completed writing. Also, some styles may require more updates than others -- you may find it useful to write using one style and switch to another when you complete writing.
As Jon points out, you permanently broke those links by using export-import in place of a regular data back-up.
Any dragging and dropping you do in Zotero itself has no impact whatsoever on where the files are stored nor on their internal ID (which links them to references in Ooo).
I think, unfortunately, the Windows/Ooo combo is also generally the slowest performing for Zotero - but what ajlyon says on some suggestion to improve performance.
Sorry to have forgotten the most important info:
Zotero and OO plugin are both the latest stable release
Firefox is version 3.6.3
John: as far as I remember it's 1 GB memory but not suer, maybe 2 GB (thats max anyway)
I will tell my daughter to erase the bibliography until the doc is completed. This doesn't endanger me to be skinned alive by her if the references are gone again and she has to redo all of them :-) (what a hell of a work and prone to mistakes!)
AND: I will not make the backup mistake again, I promise!
One more question came to my mind:
If I sync the bibliography to the Zotero server and Firefox is destroyed will it be ok to sync the Bibliography back to the local PC (assumed that the profile name in firefox is the same after a new installation) and will the references in OO doc will still work?
Peter
BUT: I will NEVER consider to install a Linux distro! Why, you might ask?
Because I don't want the wrath of my daughter bearing down on me!
She is a rather blissfully computer-ignorant student (human medicine!!!!!) and very impatient.
If she doesn't get something to work within 5 minutes she starts something else!
It would grey my scalp even more!!
Peter
[slight caveat about people who have really large databases have been having trouble with their initial sync, but that's getting less of a problem as Zotero develops]
One thing to keep in mind - you don't have to keep the zotero folder (which has the database and any files you may have saved) inside the firefox folder. Which can make backup easier.
Synced references will still work - it's what allows you to work on an openoffice doc on difference computers.
Oh and you don't need to keep the firefox profile name the same (though it won't hurt), zotero sync relies on your user name being the same.
[heh, I understand the linux thing - but really, something as user friendly as Ubuntu would surprise you both; it's really not like the command line tech-head world of ten years ago, especially if you've already made the jump to openoffice. And I would personally, not use Windows XP anymore haven't Microsoft stopped supporting it? So now more security patches. Something else to keep in mind]
300GB flashdrives are at 50US$ now, so there's no excuse for not having and using one.
*actually, any user doing important work - those factors just make it even more important.