Issue with sharing 1 Zotero database between 2 user profiles on same PC [Win 10]

Hi, quick question for the experts.

Does Zotero do anything to 'lock down' the Zotero database/files to a specific user on Windows? If so, is there a work-around?

My situation is I'm trying to set up a local user account as my main account on my work laptop (because my domain-based account is painfully slow to start-up/resume). But I might need to switch back sometimes, and want to keep a bunch of files in common rather than duplicate them (I'll be logging off completely rather than hot-swapping between them). I was hoping to do this with my Zotero database, which is 11GB. But on the local account Zotero throws up an error on startup, and can't see the database. This happens unless it is launched with admin privileges (which is annoying).

Anyone have suggestions?
  • But on the local account Zotero throws up an error on startup, and can't see the database.
    What error?

    But this doesn't really have anything to do with Zotero specifically — it's likely just a general permissions issue that you'd have sharing any files across user accounts. You'd have to make sure that both user accounts can write to all files within the Zotero data directory.

    Note that you definitely shouldn't launch Zotero as an administrator, and if you have you might run into startup problems in the future due to certain files (particularly cache files in AppData\Local\Zotero\Zotero) having the wrong permissions.
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