Putting library on external drive and using plugins

madd

My laptop is approaching storage capacity, and a good portion of the storage seems to be devoted to Zotero. I'm thinking about moving my Zotero library to an external drive. Is there a guide to this process? Additionally, I use the Chrome Zotero plugin to grab information into my library. Will I still be able to do this if the library lives on the external drive (when it is plugged in, of course). Thank you.

dstillman

The easiest option is to just move your entire Zotero data directory to the external drive from the Advanced pane of the preferences. If this is a laptop, you'll just want to be extremely careful that you don't unmount the drive while Zotero is open, since that is likely to corrupt the database.

The alternative would be to store just your attached files on the external drive using linked files and the ZotFile extension, but, as explained on the linked page, that would prevent Zotero from syncing those files, deleting them automatically, etc.

None of this has any effect on the Zotero Connector.

madd

Thank you! So, just to make sure I'm reading these guides correctly: I can turn off auto-syncing in Zotero, use the Advanced pane "show data directory" to locate the Zotero data directory, plug in my external drive to my PC, drag the data directory to my external drive, and continue to use Zotero? Are there additional steps in this process? Thanks.

dstillman

When going across drives, where it's technically a copy rather than a move anyway, you can just close Zotero, copy (rather than move) the data directory to the external drive, reopen Zotero, and then point Zotero at the new location from the Advanced pane of the preferences. Once it's using the new location, you can just delete the old folder.

But if you move rather than copy, when you restart Zotero and the data directory is missing I believe it should prompt you to locate the data directory.