Best approach for new setup?

sbgarrett

Hello,
I’d love some expert advice about how to proceed.

For the last few years I used a laptop on which I had Zotero installed and had Zotfile running so that when I used the Chrome widget to save a reference to Zotero, the PDF that came with it would be renamed and automatically sent to Google Drive. I did this so that I could then use my iPad to annotate PDFs from that Google Drive folder, which would sync back into the Zotero library. The system worked ok, though not ideal.

Now I have moved over to a new laptop because the old one is crapping out. A ton of the PDFs represented in my Zotero library are on Google Drive, which my new laptop-based Zotero app can't yet find/see. Given the improvements to Zotero, I no longer feel the need to use Google drive because now I can just access and annotate Zotero-stored PDFs directly on the iPad.
My question: Given all this, what is the most straightforward way to use those PDFs, currently on GoogleDrive, going forward? Is there a straightforward way to just bring all those PDFs into Zotero's own storage, still linked with their existing parent items? I’d be happy to do that and exclusively use Zotero going forward.

Thank you for your advice.

dstillman

Tools → Manage Attachments → Convert Linked Files to Stored Files

adamsmith

Given this:

A ton of the PDFs represented in my Zotero library are on Google Drive, which my new laptop-based Zotero app can't yet find/see.

Though, you first need to get the PDFs linked back to Zotero. Assuming you have a linked GDrive folder on your new computer that has all the PDFs in question, setting the Linked File Base directory to your google drive folder should relink the files.

Then run the command provided by dstillman

sbgarrett

Thank you very much, @adamsmith and @dstillman. I appreciate it.
It looks like it's worked!

Going forward from here, I'd like to check what I see as my remaining steps:
i should be able to delete all files from my googledrive (if I want to streamline things); and
if I don't want to mess with GoogleDrive at all for Zotero work, I can just remove the Drive folder from the Linked File Base directory?
Anything else to close that chapter of google+Zotero?

thank you again.

tim820

The Linked Attachment Base Directory setting only tells Zotero where to look for linked attachment files. It has no influence on attachments in local Zotero storage (ie under Zotero\storage), now or in the future. So if you have all your attachment files (back) in local storage, any LABD setting is simply irrelevant (ie you can remove it or leave it).