Sync different accounts

carmenmunumer

Hi, I would like to know what happens in Zotero when I disable syncing with an account in order to sync with a different account. If later I want to return to the first account library, will everything appear as before ?

Thank you so much for your answer.

dstillman

When you go to switch accounts or choose to unlink your account and delete local data, Zotero will delete all data associated the account from your computer. As long as you were fully in sync with the online library previously, if you switched back to it Zotero would pull down the data from the online library. (If you do this, I would recommend making sure you have regular backups of your Zotero data directory, since if for some reason you weren't fully in sync you would lose any recent data.)

But if this is something you would be doing regularly, it'd be much better to simply use multiple profiles rather than deleting data.

carmenmunumer

Thanks for your answer, but I still find some troubles. After reading hoy to use multiple profiles I don’t understand hoy to do it in Zotero desktop application. Would you please explain it simplerr? In adiccion, I would like to know if multiple profiles may eventually be joined in orden to have everything in then same library.

Thank you for your support.

dstillman

The linked documentation explains how to do it. If there's a part you don't understand, you'd need to ask a more specific question. But this would be fairly advanced usage, so I wouldn't recommend it if you're not comfortable with the instructions.

Joining libraries from separate databases later is possible, but not ideal — you'd have to either do an export to Zotero RDF from one to the other (which would break links to citations in word processor documents and reset Date Added/Modified times) or transfer via an intermediate group library (which would also break links to citations).

Generally, unless you have a very compelling reason to use multiple profiles, you're better off just creating a group library so that you can access both libraries within the same Zotero instance.