What is the storage folder

streifenleopard

Hi everyone,
I had quit Zotero a while ago as my uni offers Citavi for free (Sorry guys!).
Since my Firefox is getting extremely slow I think about abandoning FF altogether or at least get rid of some plugins. Not wanting to lose my Zotero stuff yet, I decided to install Zotero Standalone. I have simply moved my files from
C:\Users\<Name>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\kx5v4ju2.default\zotero to
C:\Users\<Name>\AppData\Roaming\Zotero\Zotero\Profiles\bfzptln7.default\zotero
1. Was this the correct thing to do? It seems to work alright.
2. What is in the storage folder?
Much to my surprise I realised I had to transfer 500MB. I don't know what this all is. A look into some of the randomly named subfolders has not revealed anything comprehensible. In case it's stored pdfs somewhere: I have a NAS where I like to keep all my PDFs etc and thsi is where it should go. How can I transfer any PDFs from this folder to my NAS?
Thank you!

aurimas

I have simply moved my files from
C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\kx5v4ju2.default\zotero to
C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Zotero\Zotero\Profiles\bfzptln7.default\zotero
1. Was this the correct thing to do? It seems to work alright.

Yes, that should be fine. Though note that uninstalling Zotero from Firefox doesn't actually delete your data from the Firefox profile (if you reinstalled it, your library would still be there). In any case, this is fine.

2. What is in the storage folder?

Among other minor things, zotero.sqlite file contains all the metadata in your library. The "storage" folder contains all of your file attachments (PDFs, Snapshots, other files you may have attached).

How can I transfer any PDFs from this folder to my NAS?

This sort of depends on whether you want to continue using Zotero and have your attachments stored on a NAS or you just want to part ways and transfer your PDFs to a NAS folder in some decently organized way.

streifenleopard

Ok, I extracted all pdfs from this multitude of folders and a quick glance revealed that I seem to have all of them on my NAS already. There was some double saving going on on Zotero or on Citavi, ok.

aurimas

Just FYI, you could have used ZotFile to move the PDFs into an arbitrary folder and rename them based on metadata (e.g. author-date-title.pdf) or place them into subdirectories based on metadata

etoker

Could someone please explain how the storage folder is organized? I'm not sure what the folder names refer to and their contents seem weirdly random. Any help wrapping my mind around this would be much appreciated.

bwiernik

Zotero natively stores each attachment in a separate folder labeled according to its internal Zotero item ID. It's not intended to be human readable and you should generally not try to navigate it manually--use Zotero for searching, modifying attachments, etc.