Upgrade StorageDealing with duplicate PDFs
Hi there, after a period of not using Zotero I'm trying to figure out the best way to start using it more effectively and would appreciate any advice.
Prior to starting to use a citation manager, I organized all my saved PDFs in subfolders on my Mac. I have hundreds or thousands of PDFs saved this way. When I started using Zotero, I added them all as stored files (not realizing the difference between stored and linked files) and ran into the problem of Zotero making a copy of every PDF, which has completely filled my hard drive. Other threads (ex here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/82097/pdfs-duplicated) recommend just deleting the original files, but I am hesitant to do this because I don't want to lose my current folder structure it if I were to switch to a different citation manager someday.
I stopped using Zotero for a while, during which time I saved hundreds more PDFs to my computer. In most folders I now have a mix of old PDFs that are in Zotero and new PDFs that are not, so it's a bit of a disaster trying to sort them out.
At this point, I've been thinking my best bet might be to delete Zotero's entire data directory and then start over by adding my PDFs as linked files instead of stored ones to avoid the duplication issue.
Is there any drawback to this? Or a better solution (maybe with Zotfile, which I need to read up on?) Should I suck it up and abandon my antiquated method for organizing folders on my computer?
Thanks in advance!
Prior to starting to use a citation manager, I organized all my saved PDFs in subfolders on my Mac. I have hundreds or thousands of PDFs saved this way. When I started using Zotero, I added them all as stored files (not realizing the difference between stored and linked files) and ran into the problem of Zotero making a copy of every PDF, which has completely filled my hard drive. Other threads (ex here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/82097/pdfs-duplicated) recommend just deleting the original files, but I am hesitant to do this because I don't want to lose my current folder structure it if I were to switch to a different citation manager someday.
I stopped using Zotero for a while, during which time I saved hundreds more PDFs to my computer. In most folders I now have a mix of old PDFs that are in Zotero and new PDFs that are not, so it's a bit of a disaster trying to sort them out.
At this point, I've been thinking my best bet might be to delete Zotero's entire data directory and then start over by adding my PDFs as linked files instead of stored ones to avoid the duplication issue.
Is there any drawback to this? Or a better solution (maybe with Zotfile, which I need to read up on?) Should I suck it up and abandon my antiquated method for organizing folders on my computer?
Thanks in advance!
Even if you migrate your data elsewhere someday, it's likely anything else you switched to would support collections or folders. The idea of switching back to OS folders is sort of a flawed premise for the very reason that you'd want to transfer the files in the first place: items in Zotero can exist in multiple collections, so there'd be no way to export them back to an OS folder structure without duplicating files.
As for ZotFile, while it is possible to use ZotFile to organize linked files into folders by metadata, 1) you would still delete the original files in that case and use a different folder for the linked files and 2) there's really not much reason to do that when you can easily find things within Zotero or even just search by title/author using Spotlight, which should find files stored in Zotero.