attachment sync

abhirkmv
Most of the discussion on Zotero sync says that sync is automatically triggered on any change to the library?
It is not clear whether a change to any attachment counts as a change to the library.
Is there a way to trigger sync on any change to any attachment? I often have to manually sync to get days-old changes, even when Zotero was open.

If there is no such automatic option, can the sync be triggered by an external script or at a customizable fixed interval, say every 5 minutes?
  • bwiernik
    When you save a file that is stored or linked in Zotero, those changes will automatically sync. Zotero uses the file modification times to determine when files need to be synced.
  • dstillman
    I think @abhirkmv is asking about when a sync is actually triggered, though, and for technical reasons that can't currently happen in response to outside file modifications, only changes within Zotero. In the next major version we'll hopefully be able to do more efficient monitoring of storage files so that we can get a notification when files change without polling.

    For now, though, I'm afraid you'll need to sync manually or make a change in Zotero itself to trigger an auto-sync. (An auto-sync will sync modified files you've opened via Zotero in the last three hours, or all files at startup or if it's been three hours since the last check.)
  • abhirkmv
    @dstillman : Thanks for the clarification. I open zotero-managed PDFs in external applications, e.g. okular, and sync is indeed not triggered when I edit and save the PDF in Okular.

    By "change in zotero" do you mean change in the code of Zotero (vs., e.g., change in configuration files)?
  • bwiernik
    No, he means changing an item (any item) in Zotero, such as adding an item, modifying a field, adding or removing a tag, etc. Or you can click the green sync arrow to trigger a manual sync.
  • dstillman
    Also worth noting that your PDF reader has to store annotations in the PDF itself — not in a sidecar file — for changes to upload at all.
  • abhirkmv
    To get all attachments to sync periodically, can I write a script to restart zotero, say, every 20 minutes? `killall -9 zotero-bin` kills zotero. Is there a safer way to externally stop zotero?
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