Hi,
I seem to be having two common problems but haven't been able to find an answer because so many people post a question but don't follow up with the needed info.
Fair warning: I'm going to give a detailed explanation of my problem, so this will be a LONG post. Sorry. Thank you in advance.
These are the questions I would like answered:
1. How can I re-enable the Watch folder without Mendeley crashing?
2. How can I re-enable the Watch folder without Mendeley re-importing all of my articles as duplicates? Many of them are re-imported without the appropriate metadata(this detail prevents the "Find Duplicates" feature from working.
3. What can I do to prevent this in the future?
For now, I would be willing to delete, re-install, or whatever as long as I don't mess up my current database. In 6 months, I would be reluctantly willing to destroy my current database and start over, if that is the only solution.
The details:
I am running Windows 7 professional and Mendeley 1.12.1 on both my laptop and my desktop. I currently have the unlimited web storage option on the Mendeley website. My problem has been occurring for many Mendeley updates and I am just now needing to fix it.
I initially installed Mendeley 3 yrs ago and successfully used the Watch folder feature on a general "Journal Articles" folder with many sub-folders(& sub-sub-folders, etc) located in my OneDrive cloud sync folder which syncs to both computers. I'm guessing there was about 500 total folders and sub-folders with about 5,000 files when I started. I noticed problems when I would fix the metadata on one computer and have it appropriately sync with the other computer but Mendeley would then start re-importing duplicate files that were missing metadata.
This was creating a huge mess, eating up my Mendeley web storage, and I needed to concentrate on my work so I just disabled the Watch folder without un-checking the "Journal Articles" folder. Whenever I needed to, I would just manually import files to the appropriate folder in Mendeley desktop while continuing to save other files to the "Journal Articles" folder. Now there are about 1600 total folders with about 22,000 total PDF files. (Many of these files are duplicates, but saved under different names. Long story....I'm working on fixing it.)
For a while now I have wanted to re-enable the Watch folder. When navigating under the Options tab of Mendeley Desktop to enable the Watch folder I can see the greyed out file explorer "file tree" (IDK if this the right term) with the check boxed to the "Journal Articles" folder filled in with a blue square and subsequent sub-folders with blue squares. I am unable to scroll or un-check the blue squares. When I enable the Watch folder intending to un-check the square Mendeley will freeze and Windows will indicate it is busy with the blue circle where the mouse used to be. Mendeley then attempts to import all 22000 files, becomes non-responsive, and require a force close. When I re-open Mendeley I get the option to recover my database. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't recover it. It doesn't seem to affect my files.
I hope that is enough info. Thanks for reading.
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