Lost references when installing on new computer

When installing Endnote X5 on my new computer and then nominating as default my library which I copied over, it seems to have wiped all my references (the lirary now shows zero refernces when opened) though the file size seems to have remained the same.  Any suggestions?

I am using Endnote on a Windows PC.

How did you transfer your library? I would suggest following the steps under “Compress Library for EndNote X and later users” from this article:

https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/article/EndNote-Moving-backing-up-or-transferring-libraries-to-another-computer

Thanks Jason for the reply, but the compressed file doesn’t seem to generate when I follow those steps. 

Can I email you the .enl the library file to see if we can work out waht is going on?

The problem is that the .enl file is not the whole library. A library consists of a .enl file and a .Data folder which will be in the same location and have the same name. If you have “My Library.enl” on your Desktop, you will also have a “My Library.Data” folder on your Desktop. You will want to make sure you move both items. If compressing them is not working, you can zip them both and move them. You can then unzip and open on the new computer.

Endnote 5 is a while back… I wonder if you downloaded the one month free trial on the new endnote if  you could fix the problem.  (keep a backup obviously).  There are some recovery tools that might be useful

My sense is that your problem relates to the length of the pdfs, which can cause abject misery and a massive waste of time… 

I have windows, and some things I have learned with great dismay.

  - Do not have Endnote open when you perform a “clean disk” in Windows 10 ends up corrupting the entire file.

  - I am guessing you have very long names of the pdfs - which cause all sorts of problems.  Endnote shortened the pdfs in newer versions.

   - Something that has caused me a ton of grief is that Endnote only shortens the pdfs for new citations it imports.   If - for example - you import an Endnote file into another endnote files, it doesn’t change the file length (in any version of Endnote). 

So you may need to identify and manually import the pdfs with very long names since Endnote won’t do it for you. 

    

Jason I appreciate your response.

I haven’t been able to fiind a zip file that can zip up my 70 gb data file.

However, since then I found that the backup program Acronis was able to do a full backup and restore on another computer.

I appreciate your help.   Do you have a zip program to reccomend that might have been able to handle the task?

Rani