Multiple Accounts Mixing

amyallocco

I am a university student helping faculty members with their bibliographies, so I needed to be able to access multiple Zotero accounts on my personal laptop. Once I created and started putting libraries into the 2nd person's account, Zotero mixed the two different accounts' libraries even though I was always logged into the correct one in Firefox and the standalone. Now these two professor's bibliographies are mixed in with one another and I've tried everything imaginable to correct this, but I can't get them to be separate. Whatever I change in one person's, it does to the other's. I've tried using two different Firefox profiles, but that didn't work. Are there any other suggestions for how to separate these two accounts and keep them separate when I work on them in the future?

Thank you!

adamsmith

You won't be able to separate them any other way than to manually delete all items that don't belong for each account and sync.
It's not clear to me exactly what you did, but if you sync with an account, everything that you currently see in your library gets synced, so it sounds to me that Zotero did exactly what it was supposed to.
Remember you don't actually "log-in" to a Zotero account - you just change the sync information.

There are two ways to solve this in the future:
1. Use zotero groups rather than accounts
2. Use two separate Firefox profiles (I believe you can also use profiles for Standalone)
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles edit: how did that "not work"?

aurimas

It seems that you were not using separate profiles (by starting firefox or zotero standalone with the -p flag) but were simply changing the sync username and password. If that is the case, then be very careful how you untangle this mess.

If you log into one account and start deleting entries that don't belong to it then sync, that will fix that one account. But now if you log into the other account, the same changes will be synchronized and you will essentially lose an entire library worth of data.

If you have not been doing so already, create two different profiles on firefox or standalone (see adamsmith's post above). Set up each with a different sync account and clean them up manually using the two different profiles. You may be able to use the Date Added field to your advantage. Any new entries to the library will have an updated date added field.

EDIT: Also, if you have not done so already, make backups of the libraries. If you have backups for the libraries before you started messing around with them, you can fairly easily restore the data for each account (see the same link)

Patty.Huijbers

Hi,

I used the profile manager line on my computer and it worked like a charm. When I try to implement it on a computer with Windows 8, however, it does not.
I'd just browsed for the Zotero executable file and then added -p (with a space between), but also tried without. Do you have a clue what I could change to make it work?

adamsmith

Just so we're on the same page: You followed these instructions: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles#firefox:win8:fx27 replacing the Firefox path with the Zotero path?

CyrLeeS

Looks like I'm a few years late.

Things may have been different in 2012, but for future people looking to manage multiple accounts that might come across this forum as I have, I found this link handy http://guides.lib.unc.edu/c.php?g=8437&p=43451.

If a mix-up has already occurred, such as that in the parent question, you may find the export and import functions handy. That is, you can selectively save libraries, collections, items, and the like into a backup file.

If you use this technique coupled with instructions on how to manage multiple accounts, you will find it relatively easy to sort through the mess that happened :) Cheers.

PS there may be other solutions if you are working directly in your browser, but I prefer the interface in stand alone.