Use same standalone from a guest VM

I use Linux for my primary OS. I run Zotero 5.0 and use it with LibreOffice and Google Docs, and everything works great. However, I often need to submit manuscripts and collaborate with colleagues who require Word on Windows. For those occasions, I use VirtualBox to run Word in a VM. This also works just fine, except I currently have to run another complete standalone Zotero 5.0 inside the VM and have another synced copy of my Zotero library in there. It only takes about a half-hour to sync my library, and it takes over 4GB of disk space, so it's not killing me, but it just seems really inefficient to be running two standalone Zoteros at the same time on the same machine. If the browser extensions and word processor plugins communicated strictly over a network socket, then it would be easy to allow just one standalone instance to be running.

Is there any way to accomplish this?
  • edited January 10, 2021
    If the browser extensions and word processor plugins communicated strictly over a network socket
    The Google Docs plugin does, but the Word plugin doesn't, so no, this isn't possible.

    But:
    It only takes about a half-hour to sync my library, and it takes over 4GB of disk space, so it's not killing me,
    What's taking half an hour? There's no need for a full sync. An incremental sync should take a few seconds. And you can set "download as needed" in the VM to avoid downloading attachment files (and delete any existing files within the Zotero data directory).

    You can also disable full-text content syncing and clear the full-text index to reduce the DB size if you don't need to search by full text in the VM.
  • Trying to use the same database in the VM and not will definitely lead to corruption.

    I would suggest disabling file sync on the Windows Zotero entirely and just using that library for citations.
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