Syncing on two devices that are hopelessly out of sync now

jwbullard66

I have been rashly using rsync to try to manually sync my Zotero data across two Mac OS devices and only now realized that it is not working at all. My two Zoteros are about 90% the same but have otherwise diverged. Can anyone give me guidance about a good way to get them in sync with each other at this point without losing a lot of data from either one? If I can get them synced then I will gladly switch over to Zotero's sync method from now on.

adamsmith

assuming you didn't corrupt the database using rsync, just setting up Zotero sync should be all you need to do. Make sure you have back-ups of both databases just to be sure, but sync will only delete items that you have explicitly deleted in either location, so you shouldn't be losing anything.
Do note, though, that this will only work if none of the machines had ever been synced to a different account. It's not easily possible to merge databases that are linked to different accounts. (We'll have some suggestions, though, if that's the case)