How can the members of a group library stop Zotero from filling the hard drive of their computers?

Adrian Veraza

Hello to everyone. I am part of a group library with unlimited storage. Some members of the team are concerned about the documents of the library filling space in their computers. How can we stop the documents synced in Zotero from filling their hard drive? I have tried deleting documents by going into Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Files and Folders/Show data directory/ to delete PDFs directly from my hard drive. However, these documents are also deleted from the library we share. Any advice on how to address this issue would be much appreciated. Thanks for your support.

dstillman

They can set Zotero to download files "as needed" in the Sync pane of the preferences.

I have tried deleting documents by going into Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Files and Folders/Show data directory/ to delete PDFs directly from my hard drive.

That's fine, but if you do that, all you're doing is deleting the file on your own computer — you're not actually affecting the group. They could do the same on their computers. As long as the file has already been uploaded to the group library, trying to open it would simply redownload it from Zotero servers.

Future versions of Zotero will allow configuring how long to keep downloaded files when using "as needed" mode, which will make it easier to manage local disk usage without going into the filesystem.

Adrian Veraza

Thanks! I will try to guide them through the sync pane process of preferences and see how it goes.

---

About the second point, the document I deleted even disappeared from the library in Zotero Org. Any ideas on why this is happening? Apparently, the sync option applies to the changes I make in the computer, so I think that it may be a bit risky for the members of the team to go into the Zotero files to delete them, even if it's from their own computers.

dstillman

About the second point, the document I deleted even disappeared from the library in Zotero Org.

Then you deleted the attachment item in Zotero, not the file in your filesystem. Deleting the file from your filesystem absolutely does not affect anyone else.

Adrian Veraza

So the file folders (storage, styles, translators, tmp, locate) in which the attachments are saved are not taking space from the hard drive?

I deleted the attachments from those file folders. Since they appear in the local drive, I assume they are just stored in the computer. However, when I delete them from the local drive, they also disappear from Zotero Org.

Sorry for insisting; I don't quite understand the synergy between Zotero and the computer.

Thanks for your help!

dstillman

There are two things here: items in your library in Zotero (stored in the zotero.sqlite database file in your data directory) and attachment files on your disk (within the 'storage' folder of your data directory)

Changes you make in Zotero itself, including deleting attachment items, will be synced to zotero.org and other group members. If you delete an attachment item in Zotero and empty the trash, the associated file on disk will also be deleted automatically.

Changes you make directly on your disk, including deleting PDFs from within the 'storage' folder, will not be synced to others and will not affect anyone else in any way. You keep saying that happened, but I assure you it did not. You're misremembering this. All that does is delete the local copy of the file, and double-clicking on the attachment item again in Zotero will redownload it to the same location in the 'storage' folder.