two copies of every attachment

geotux

Hi,

I have a zoetero account and have the plugin set ot sync data to my zoetro account. I then have an OwnCloud webdav registration to store my PDFs. Every time I upload a PDF, it get copied in my local folder /home/antonio/zotero/storage and on my webdav server. Given that I have Owncloud operating, I end up getting a second copy created after a few seconds in /home/antonio/owncloud/zotero/storage.

How can I get zotero to stop creating a copy in /home/antonio/zotero? I thought this directory was only used for storing the database once a storage was setup for the PDFs.

Can someone please enlighten me?

Many thanks
Antonio

dstillman

Zotero stores files in its data directory. If, when something is uploaded to your WebDAV server, it ends up back on your computer, that doesn't have anything to do with Zotero. If you don't want that, don't use OwnCloud for your WebDAV server, or configure it not to pull down files from that folder (if you can—selective sync is possible with Dropbox, for example). As far as Zotero is concerned it's just uploading the file to a WebDAV server for syncing.

Zotero did recently gain on-demand download functionality, which lets you avoid storing a copy of every file on every computer and instead just downloads files as needed, but there's not currently a way to delete local files that already exist. You can set on-demand download up on other computers, though, from the Sync pane of the Zotero preferences. After you open a file it will be downloaded to the 'storage' directory. A way to delete local files in combination with on-demand download will happen at some point.

geotux

Great, thanks for the clarification. But wouldnàt it make sense to seperate the storage facility from the data facility (i.e. be able to sepcify a storage location different from the database location)? THis was, i could tell zoetro that although it's data directory is /home/antonio/zotero, it should be storing it's PDFs in /home/antonio/owncloud/zotero.
That way, zotero wouldnàt have to worry about uploading files to webdav as the ownclient would take care of it.

I don't understand the benefit of webdav feature if I'm forced to have a duplicate copy of the storage folder on each PC. Don't you think there is a logic here?

Regards
Antonio

adamsmith

there may be multiple reasons, but one is that by placing /storage into the zotero data folder, zotero automatically knows where the files are stored on every computer, no need to specify a separate data folder.

If you do want a separate folder, you can look at ZotFile/linked files and relative link attachment paths.