Upgrade StorageUsing Zotero 5.0 with no access to local drive
I'm a librarian at an educational institution, and about a year ago I brought in Zotero and had it installed on all the student computers. The way our IT department has set up these computers, students have no access to the local drive - they can only save files onto their virtual drive (this is so they can log in to any computer and have all their files available). I understand that Zotero works best when the Zotero library is saved on a local drive, but so far this has been working fine, with only the occasional hiccup.
When I asked the IT team to update all the computers to Zotero 5.0, they said the new version produces an error because it tries to save the library to the local drive by default.
Can anyone confirm that this is a change in 5.0? And if so, is there any way to use Zotero 5.0 with no access to the local drive?
Thanks!
When I asked the IT team to update all the computers to Zotero 5.0, they said the new version produces an error because it tries to save the library to the local drive by default.
Can anyone confirm that this is a change in 5.0? And if so, is there any way to use Zotero 5.0 with no access to the local drive?
Thanks!
Both the Zotero profile directory and the Zotero data directory are within the home directory (%userprofile%) by default. If the entire home directory were on a separate drive and writable, it would work out of the box. But if the home directory isn't writeable, it won't.
The profile flags are the same as Firefox's, meaning you can pass -profile /path/to/profile to the executable to specify a different profile directory.
In prefs.js in the profile directory you can change extensions.zotero.dataDir to point to a different path and set extensions.zotero.useDataDir to true. If you need to use -profile, though, you might run into trouble, because Zotero would create a new profile directory on the virtual drive in the specified location but then try to use %userprofile%\Zotero. It's possible we can add a command-line flag to allow either using a 'zotero' directory within the profile directory or specifying an explicit data directory — people who want to run Zotero from a USB drive have a similar need here.
"It appears this would require us to make a change to the Firefox profile of every single student, to point them to a different Zotero profile directory.
This post provides no instructions on how to even achieve this, just a general idea of what to do. Easy to figure out for one user, but pushing it to 1000+ will be a far greater endeavour that I'm honestly not even sure how to achieve. Firefox isn't a Windows component so it's far more difficult to manage with Group Policy.
The reality is that for us to deploy software that widely, it needs to be fully compatible with roaming profiles. It's a part of any IM software review. You may need to submit a feature request to the company to fully support network locations out-of-the-box, stay with Zotero 4, or look for another software solution that is more compatible with our network. Manually altering 1000s of Firefox profiles via a script that we would have to write, test, and deploy ourselves to allow for a configuration that is considered both legacy and unsupported by the vendor is unfortunately not an acceptable workaround."
But in the next version, we're going to add a command-line flag to allow use of the profile directory (which is within the roaming profile) for storing data. I'll post here when that's available.
(For what it's worth, storing data in a subdirectory of the home directory is done by lots of cloud-synced software — Dropbox, Creative Cloud, etc. — so I would think those would all have the same problem.)
-datadir profileto the Zotero executable to have it use a 'zotero' directory within the Zotero profile directory, the same as Zotero 4.0 did. (It also takes an absolute path, but that's probably not what you want.)