Large library with 8k records in Zotero Standalone

ggovil

Hi,

Is there a limit on no. of items to be synced? One of my colleagues had to have two Zotero accounts because her old account stopped syncing (wherein she had around 8k plus records in Zotero Standalone ). Other's weren't able to see the changes she was making in Standalone. Because of this problem, she had to start using two separate laptops and logins.

We are trying to tackle the issue at its base so we can have her work on just one laptop and also that she doesn't run into the same problem again. The issues bring us to the questions; if someone has around 8k plus records in their Standalone, would syncing take up more time every time she refreshes the content? Is she going to run into the same situation (syncing issues) again once she crosses a certain no. of records in her library?

Thanks for throwing some light on the issue!

Gauri

adamsmith

8k certainly isn't a problem (and hasn't been for years). Generally Zotero 5 should work better with large libraries. There's no theoretical limit to number of items, but I'd expect Zotero to start creaking around 50k items across all libraries -- the problems would be more local performance, though, than syncing (in Zotero 5; in Zotero 4, it was tricky to initially sync libraries of that size).

If you or someone on your team has problems with syncing, they should post here for troubleshooting -- only way we can actually tell what's going on.

bwiernik

There is no limit to the number of items that can be synced (for comparison, I have roughly 16,200 items syncing in my database). Syncing of stored attachment files is limited by your storage space for Zotero/WebDAV, but that is unrelated to syncing of the item metadata.

To address your colleague’s syncing problems, start here and report back with exactly what you’ve tried and what you are seeing:
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/changes_not_syncing

ggovil

Hi,

As the latest update to resolve my colleagues problem, we have tackled one part and her old account (with 8 k plus records) is now syncing. She is still working with two accounts though.

One strange thing we witnessed while working on the old account is:

• We uninstalled Zotero stand-alone from her work laptop and confirmed that it was no longer on her laptop

• While being logged out of any Zotero account (no web version of Zotero was open on the work laptop), we installed the Firefox Zotero connector and Zotero standalone Version 5.0 (an upgrade from the prior version on her laptop)

• When the newly installed Zotero standalone was opened on her work laptop – it appeared with all of the old content from the version that had been uninstalled – including content that had been deleted!!! This happened even though we were not logged into any web version of Zotero and had not yet added an account in the standalone to tell it where to sync from!

Question: Is there a way to wipe out all data from standalone (even if we have to repeat the procedure of uninstalling and installing) so that we can sync it like a clean slate?

Thanks for your guidance,

Gauri Govil

adamsmith

Find your Zotero data folder: https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data
Close down Zotero
move the folder to a different location such as your Desktop (you can delete this once everything is working)
Restart Zotero -- your library will be empty and you can sync.

(Regular de-install does not delete local data and Zotero will find local databases on re-install)