Moving over to an external hard drive

liznilsen

I'm a PhD student, and the size of my collections is getting quite large and getting bigger - to the point that my computer (a Mac for what's it's worth) often makes me close out just about everything except my browser and Zotero. I attach pdfs to each reference and then annotate. At this point, I need to move everything onto an external hard drive.

I don't want to crash anything, so am looking for guidance or "don't do THIS."

adamsmith

I'd recommend against moving your Zotero database to an external hard drive. It'll slow everything down significantly.
If you're having memory issues with Zotero specifically, you should report those. Mutiple large PDFs with annotation can take up a fair amount of RAM, but you really shouldn't be crashing a reasonably modern Mac with that.

dstillman

Also this seems to be conflating memory and disk space. An external hard drive wouldn't have anything to do with memory usage. @liznilsen, what's the exact message you're getting, and why do you think you need to move everything onto an external drive?