Two out-of-sync libraries

ow · February 2, 2017

I have the same library in two locations. Each hasn't been synced in a while and each has new documents that I'd like to combine in the cloud. If I sync one, will I lose the documents that yet to be synced on the other? Or will Zotero mind the differences and unify the additions from both libraries? Wanted to know what I'm getting into. Also, would it be preferable to update to the 5.0 beta before syncing the two libraries?

adamsmith · February 2, 2017

You will definitely not lose anything -- Zotero sync would do basically what you'd think of as a merge.

There's one caveat when using two versions of the same library that haven't been synced for a while this way, which is that it doesn't handle deleting items from collections very gracefully. It's a bit of a complicated story, but essentially assume that if you removed items from collections, they will reappear (Zotero will show you a pop-up message telling you that happened). My understanding is that this is much improved in 5.0, so if you expect that to be a problem, upgrade to 5.0 first. Otherwise it doesn't matter.