No longer syncing group -- how do I remove the synced items and attachments on my local system

emilianoeheyns

I did see some other questions on the forum that seemed the same or similar, but I could not distill from them what I had to do to remove the items that were previously synced to my system. I have disabled sync for these groups in the prefs, but the items and attachments remain.

dstillman

But you want to remain in the groups?

There's not currently an easy way to do this. If you disable syncing, it just disables syncing (and only when for auto-sync and the sync button — you can still right-click and sync the groups manually). There's no way to remove a group that's already synced without leaving the group.

So one option would be to set your library sync settings as you want them, make sure you're fully in sync, close Zotero, delete zotero.sqlite and 'storage', and then sync down the checked libraries to the empty database.

We can think about offering a way to remove just the local copy of a group.

emilianoeheyns

I do want to remain in the groups. Description is clear; and I wasn't glossing over an existing solution in the other threads. Thanks!

bwiernik

Emiliano, I’m not really following what state you want to be in. Could you describe it all together?

emilianoeheyns

I am member of a group library, which I have synced. I want to remain member of this group, but get rid of the library in my local client; it has a boatload of attachments, and I'm running out of space. But I do not want to affect the group library, and I want to be able to re-sync it to my local system should the need arise later.

dstillman

If this is primarily about storage space, there'll soon be a way of controlling per group how much space is used for local files in "as needed" mode.

emilianoeheyns

For me it's primarily about storage space.