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• Simon Durrant commented  ·  May 06, 2012 10:40  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  Absolutely agree. Reliability is the most important thing when so many work hours are required to create and maintain a large library. The thought that if something crashes, or I reorganise my hard drive, or I switch to another computer or even another account on the same computer, that the library no longer works and I have to start again, is a huge deterrent to bothering to create the library in the first place.

  This should not be considered a bonus feature or optional extra in some way. This is central to Mendeley being usable on a long-term basis, and the fact that there is not so much as a response from the developers on this crucial issue says to me that they don't intend to be in it for the long-term.

• Douglas N Arnold commented  ·  April 22, 2012 09:55  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  The fact that Mendeley has chosen not to implement this, despite the fact that it has over 1000 votes over three years and would be a trivial matter to implement raises questions about their commitment to helping their users. This is an issue that is pushing me to seek out alternative reference managers. I know people who have left Mendeley because of this issue. Can we at least have a forthright comment about why this has not been implemented?

• lxg commented  ·  April 17, 2012 18:36  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  support, good idea

• sgrover commented  ·  April 06, 2012 14:27  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  Using hardlinks has a benificial (possibly unintended) side effect, i.e. if files are renamed or moved around on the computer, mendeley still points to the right place.

  I use this quite a lot. Basically, then there are two ways of accessing the library - through mendeley and through the file manager.

  I would like this functionality to be preserved(possibly by creating checksums of pdf files etc) even if mendeley switches to using pathnames in its database.

• Brian commented  ·  March 31, 2012 09:27  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  I looked into Mendeley over a year ago, got really excited, installed, and started integrating my massive article library.

  Then I ran into this issue and thought, wow ... does Mendeley think researchers only work at one computer? and promptly uninstalled and hoped that one day they'd get their act together.

  So after getting really into Evernote for other things, I thought about how useful it would be if I could get Evernote to manage my article database and citations.

  Which reminded me of Mendeley.

  And ... wow. Over a year later, they still haven't addressed such a fundamental problem.

  Guess I'll check back in another year or two ...

  Although by then, companies like Evernote and Dropbox will probably be doing what Mendeley is *trying* to do for free.

• complectrum commented  ·  March 27, 2012 11:14  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  Abso-fukn-lutely. The hard link setup is hands down the stupidest, most irritating thing about Mendeley. It's also the thing that new users to whom I (used to) recommend Mendeley first complain about, when Mendeley "loses" their files.

  At the very least there should be a user option to store relative Iinks if Mendeley doesn't want the responsibility of us screwing up our file system.

• Fabio Buttussi commented  ·  March 20, 2012 06:42  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  This will be very useful also for those (like me) that work on a PC with a virtual machine to have two different OSs. At present, I had to choose only one of the two for Mendeley, since the other will have the files on a different path even if they are in the same (shared) folder.

• Nikolaos Lampadariou commented  ·  February 16, 2012 04:12  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  This should be definitely be fixed in future versions. If you work between two linux boxes the fix is relatively easy. It involves modifying one key with the SQLite Database Browser and working with soft links. Here are the steps involved that worked for me:

  1. Start with an empty database since if you already have linked pdf's their paths won't update after you apply the changes below. Set up a watched folder (any, we will change that later), preferable an empty one so that no pdf's are imported into the database.

  2. Close Mendeley and copy the folder (~/.local/share/data/Mendeley Ltd.) and the file (~/.config/Mendeley Ltd./Mendeley Desktop.conf) to a fixed place in both boxes (e.g. /home/user/papers).

  3. Remove the above folder and file and replace them with symbolic links.

  4. Open the monitor.sqlite file with the SQLite Database Browser and on the main window in the "Browse Data" Tab you should see the path to the watch folder. Double click it and you can now edit the entry. Make the path to point to the pdf folder (/home/user/papers). Apply changes and close. If you sync your data now between the two computers you will have the exact same working database and the pdf's will be linked to the references correctly.

  Note:
  If you are the same user on both computers then the path /home/user/papers will work on both machines. If you are a different user however then replacing /home/user/papers with ~/papers should do the trick.

  Hope this helps.

• Alexandru Tudor Constantinescu commented  ·  January 30, 2012 06:16  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  @marco and others having problems with migration (NOT syncing over the day)
  I had the same problem and got a pretty much boilerplate answer from Mendeley. [ok, they don't charge you for using Mendeley, so I shouldn't complain too much]

  Here's an excerpt from the answer I gave to the Support after finding a way to migrate the database AND the PDFs.

  The easy way: sync your whole library with the server, INCLUDING the PDFs. Move to the new computer and sync again.
  Drawbacks:
  (a) if you exceed the storing quota you're out of luck
  (b) the documents will be downloaded in some special Mendeley folder, not your beloved location
  (c) if you are fiddly about file namings, your old file names will be replaced by Mendeley's default naming algorithm, which yields SomeReallyLongAndUglyFileNames.pdf.

  The hard way:
  1. locate and move the database file as per the "How can I migrate my data from one PC to another?" and "How do I locate Mendeley Desktop database files on my computer?" documents (search in the FAQ)
  2. download the SQLite Database browser from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/ Works out of the box, no install needed.
  3. Make sure Mendeley is closed and make a backup of the database file.
  4. With Mendeley still closed, open the database file in the SQLite Database browser and issue a command along the lines of:

  update Files
  set localUrl='file:///C:/Users/Alexandru/Documents/Work/Sci/Papers' || substr(localUrl,77)
  where localURL like
  'file:///C:/Dokumente%20und%20Einstellungen/Alex/Eigene%20Dateien/Work/Papers%'

  For humans: update the Files table by changing the value of localUrl as follows: prepend (put before) the characters "77 to the end of localURL" with the text file:///C:/Users.. in the rows having a localURL starting with file:///C:/Dokumente...). Take care to replace 77 with whatever your path length is and note that there are forward and not backslashes even on a Windows system. The %20 are replacements for spaces and the last % sign means "and a bunch of other characters following".

  5. Verify that the changes made are what you wanted. Save and exit. Start Mendeley. Get a beer and enjoy!

  Hope this helps a bit, worked for me like a charm (after 2 hours of fiddling around).

  *********************
  *** Disclaimer ***
  *********************
  I don't know whether the % signs in the middle of the LIKE string do affect the LIKE statement or not.

• marco commented  ·  January 16, 2012 02:38  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  oh yes - this is a MUST! I am just dealing with nearly 400 broken links due to reinstallation of one of my pc's. I am using syncronizing with SugarSync, however, for each paper added on one machine, I need to reattach the file (that is synced among all my pc's) in Mendeley. This is annoying but still manageable. However, reattaching 400 files would be a real pain!! Anyone any suggestion on how to achieve that? Just read the backup function is not intended for that, and I don't want to take the risk loosing the whole database or all file links on my other pc's as well... Solutions are heavily appreciated! Thanks!

• Anonymous commented  ·  December 12, 2011 11:22  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  I just wanted to shift to Mendeley, because it's in general such a great product. However, for me it is clearly crucial to be able to have my files synced through dropbox (among others, because I tend to mark in my pdfs with "non-note" text writings, drawings etc., which seems not to be handled well in Mendeley). But now, as there seems to be no option at all that Mendeley allows full dropbox-synchronization, with direct pdf access from Mendeley itself, I will have to go for Jabref I guess... :-( a real pity; nedless to say I'd have been willing to pay something even just to have it work in any way...

• Piet Hausberg commented  ·  December 07, 2011 04:48  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  A MUST!!!

• Anonymous commented  ·  November 21, 2011 23:26  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  This functionallity would be really useful. It is really a pain to download some papers in one machine and then have broken links in the other machine (even if you have synchronized the folders). Also it should not be very difficult to implement, since Mendeley already has this "watch folder". It should be something like "watch folder, but looking to the user's library". Hope it gets done!

• Frank commented  ·  November 14, 2011 15:10  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  Somewhere further down this thread there is a suggestion that the issue is selling hosted cloud space. I don't mind buying space to hold pdfs elsewhere (although it raises copyright issues) but I certainly hope that it is not the reason we don't have a solution to the "own folders" (and different computers) issue. Needs fixing.

• claudio commented  ·  November 13, 2011 12:51  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  I would also give my 10 votes for this... Is making my life miserable to use an unreliable web based drive for storing all the data (using 4 different computers), it would be much easier to have a synchd folder in each computer.

• mae3355 commented  ·  October 22, 2011 13:01  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  Not sure if this is a related issue. Half the time when I drag pdfs into other folders on Mendeley to have them in both folders, when I come back in there's just a broken link and I have to go download the article again on Pubmed. Please fix this! It's incredibly annoying!

• Christopher commented  ·  October 19, 2011 16:50  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  If I could spend all 10 of my votes on this, I would. I'm not even necessarily interested in syncing between computers (which would be nice, but...) - I just want Mendeley to handle my pdf directory getting moved. Now all my file links are broken and I'm going to have to patch together a solution to find them again. Gah! Little (simple!) things like this keep Mendeley as a good product but not a great product.

• khamael commented  ·  October 11, 2011 03:22  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  Hmm, if your publications have a pdf associated with it, you can just tell mendeley to synchronize attached files. And they are kept in their storage. Of course, then the personal space of 500MB (for we freeloaders) goes fast.
  Hmm and if you have both mendeley clients (in both machines) set to organize files in a folder (your dropbox) and also to have it watching it? The relative paths problem exist like this?

• Carl Anderson commented  ·  September 01, 2011 06:39  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  Alas, although I encourage my colleagues and students to use Mendeley, I am very far from the ears of those with the purse strings. I would actually suggest that Mendeley's salespeople be out there knocking on institutional doors. That might offer more opportunity for success than lone individuals within institutions asking administrators, "Hey, please spend a pile of money on this thing you have never heard of and don't understand in any case!". ;)

• Adminrobert.knight (Admin, Mendeley) commented  ·  September 01, 2011 03:16  ·  Flag as inappropriate  ·  Delete

  Hello LE,

  Please read some of my earlier comments. Hopefully we will be able to accommodate people who have to or want to store content elsewhere in future, though I do not know quite how that will work yet. I'm afraid you'll have to bear with us for a while.

  Hello Carl,

  We can do subscriptions for groups and institutions - contact business@mendeley.com if you are interested.