Backing up and restoring a group library

FiachraByrne

Currently, I use a group library with a number of colleagues for a research project. The library is moderately sized, about 2 GB, but is likely to grow and could well exceed 10 GB in the medium term.

To secure data against accidental deletion or database corruption, local computers are backed-up regularly to external drives using Time Machine and the Zotero folders are also manually backed-up to external drives.

However, restoring group libraries from such back-ups appears to be less straighforward than restoring personal libraries.

Therefore, I have been experimenting with duplicating in its entirety the group library on Zotero. I create a new group library, of which I am the sole member, on the Zotero website; I set the group library preferences so that it will include attachments; and I then populate this group library with the contents of the library I wish to back up.

On the machine on which I do this, little syncing is required but if I open a new machine, the entire duplicated library must be downloaded.

My hope is that if there is a problem with the group library I can simply replace it with the duplicate.

My question is as to whether this method is robust or flawed.

Thanks

adamsmith

I'd advise against this. It will mess with syncing if you ever need to restore from backup and will break documents authored with the group library.

The only problem with restoring from a group back up are synced accidental deletions.
The workaround suggested by the documentation seems pretty reasonable to me, no?
Regular data loss is a non-issue since as simple restore will work.

@Dan - any thoughts on how to improve the backup functionality for groups, like an option to restore to server for a specific group?

FiachraByrne

OK. Thanks for the reply. I was looking for a way around the inability to use the 'restore to Zotero server' function for group libraries. Rereading the documentation, copying and pasting zotero back-ups into the active directory should work fine in the event of a problem.

Thanks again.

dstillman

@Dan - any thoughts on how to improve the backup functionality for groups, like an option to restore to server for a specific group?

That would be a possibility with API syncing, which will happen on a per-library basis. But to work in a group setting we'd have to actually record the "Restore to" event as a deletion (albeit a more efficient one than manually deleting all items) that would trigger a "Restore from" on other clients, because otherwise remote clients wouldn't get any notification that the server library had been cleared. (The idea now is that you do "Restore to" followed by a "Restore from" on all your other computers yourself.) Anyway, a bit complicated, but one way or another we'll be much better equipped to address this later.

dstillman

Just to update this old thread, per-library "Replace Online Library" was added several years ago, and you can use that to restore a group from a backup.

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/sync_reset_options