Missing items between two computers

akateman

I mostly use Zotero on my computer in my university-office and it works fine there. But everytime I use it on my laptop at home, it seems that references or notes are missing (but certainly not all of them) after syncing. I checked my online library and that now seems to be my laptop-library (with a considerable number of references missing, as my library on my office-computer is the one I mostly use).

I have two questions now (currently working from my home computer):

1) I now turned off automatic syncing, hoping that it won't empty my library at my office computer once I am there again. How do I make sure that my library at my office computer is uploaded to my online library instead of vice versa?

2) I searched a bit on this forum and thought the problems between the two computers might be a matter of different firefox-profiles? Or different data directories? Could you help me with this?

adamsmith

How do I make sure that my library at my office computer is uploaded to my online library instead of vice versa?

Sync doesn't work that way. Individual items get synced and only get deleted when you explicitly do so in Zotero. (think of it as merging rather than uploading one or the other library). This simply sounds like your office library isn't syncing: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/changes_not_syncing

By all means make a back up of your full library (which is a good idea anyway), but the chances that sync would remove items from your office library is essentially zero.
https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#backing_up_your_zotero_library

akateman

Thanks (once again)! It must be that my office library doesn't sync correctly then. I'll look into that as soon as I return to my office next week.

And, just to be sure, I'll make a back-up of my full library before I'll start the syncing process.