Database size differences locally and in the cloud

beniam

Hello-

I just signed up for 1gb of storage space in the Zotero cloud. After syncing I noticed that my local database is approximately 515MB and the storage space I have taken up in the cloud is approximately 434.2MB. This concerns me, but I don't know if it should.

Can anyone explain why this is, or point me to a place where I can figure this out?

Thanks,
Ben

dstillman

Web snapshots are compressed before uploading.

beniam

Thanks Dan-

I was most concerned with the annotations that were included in my PDF copies of articles I've read. To make sure, I went and downloaded about 10 files from the website and checked them agains the locally stored copies. In each case the files were exactly the same size, and they had all the annotations. This is the point of syncing, so hardly surprising, but I can now report it has proven to be perfectly accurate in my small test.

When I tried to load a "snapshop of website" from my account on Zotero.org I was able to see the entry but when I selected it nothing opened. there was nothing to download and nothing to see. I guess this is exactly what Dan was explaining. So my question is:

What happens to my snapshots? Why not back them up in the cloud? Is that really the only thing that gets compressed/omitted/altered?

Thanks again,
Ben

dstillman

Nothing is omitted. As I said, snapshots are uploaded, but since they're compressed, displaying them isn't as simple as displaying PDFs. We'll be offering online snapshot viewing soon, though.

adamsmith

actually - to avoid ugly surprises: Annotations to snapshots made with Zotero's (no longer maintained) snapshot annotation feature do not sync at all.

beniam

Thanks Dan and Adam!