Archiving away old materials / trimming the fat

elainetay

Hi folks,

Having used Zotero for a while now, I'd like to trim the files down so that I have the materials that are more relevant to my current research interests at hand, but I don't have the more peripheral, outdated stuff completely lost. I'm a bit of a pack rat in that way, I find it hard to completely dump old things, and I'd like to store them in a hard drive, along with the metadata and the pdfs.

Is there a way of doing this that is relatively painless and safe, where the old data is stored away from the library that I keep in the Zotero server and box.net but I can easily retrieve it in a separate collection or library? I'm sorry - I haven't done much moving of stuff between libraries to be able to come up with a good solution or method.

aurimas

Currently, there's an almost lossless way to do this by exporting your data as Zotero RDF. The one thing you would lose is any link between the items you export (and later re-import) and the documents you inserted those references into. When you re-import, they will act as completely unrelated items. I think there are some rarely used item fields that also get lost, but I don't recall what they are atm (or if that still happens).

Other than that, there's no way to archive part of your library. That's something that would be good to have though and may happen in the future.

elainetay

Thanks, Auri! I'll investigate and, if anyone has other solutions, please post. I'll post if I have any insights here if anybody is interested on how it went.