Disable Syncing My Library

hari1 · January 12, 2019

In my preferences, I have unchecked "My Library & Feeds" and only checked one of the Groups in the Group Libraries (in Settings --> Data Syncing --> Choose Libraries ...")

However when I log into my account on zotero.org all the items and collections from my laptop are still displayed under the "My Library" tab of the web page.

How can I display only the groups on the zotero.org web page and not My Library (which I want to keep locally on my desktop)?

dstillman · January 13, 2019

Disabling syncing for a library doesn't remove it from the server, and there's no good way to do this currently. You can purge storage for My Library, which will unassociate files from the attachment items and free up storage space, but the actual items will remain behind.

Simply deleting items in your online library isn't a good option, because if you ever accidentally sync all the local items will be deleted. You could export your library to Zotero RDF, delete all items, sync, disable syncing for that library, and then reimport, but that will break any links to items from documents, reset Date Added/Modified, and possibly alter a few fields.

It's not impossible that we could implement an equivalent purge option for items, but it would be fairly complicated on a technical level.

hari1 · January 13, 2019

Thank you for this.

I did the ``purge storage'' -- even though there are still several items such as notes, etc. (and not attachments) the storage used is displayed as zero, which is fine by me.

I plan to try the 2nd idea next (export, delete and re-import).

Once again thank you for these suggestions.