How to archive a collection?

georgejones

Hi,
I have been working on a collection that is storing about 2 gigs on my hard drive. I probably have about 1400 entries.
- Do you recommend archiving the part of the library I’m not using after it reaches a certain size to speed things up, prevent corruption, etc?
- How would I archive my current library before starting a new project?
- Can I put all of the entries into one collection and archive just those entries? Or do I archive the entire current library?
- Do I archive it by exporting it and saving it on an external hard drive? Or is there another way to do this?
- If I want to consult it again in the future how would I retrieve it without losing my Zotero entries in newer projects?
- I searched for an explanation of how to do this, but couldn’t find one.
Thanks for your suggestions!

adamsmith

Except in rare circumstances, we'd not advise any sort of archiving, no. Any reasonably usable option to archive will, at a minimum, break links between Zotero items and Word documents in which they've been cited.

georgejones

Thanks for your reply.
My concern is that I'm about to start a new project that may double the number and size of current Zotero entries (I have about 1400 at the moment):
- Zotero is currently taking up about 2 gigs on my hard drive. Is the best way to reduce this size to delete the stored pdf articles while preserving the entries? Is there some easy way to batch download these to save them in a file on my hard drive? I see there is a menu item called "manage attachments" Would this help?
- Would purging Zotero of some of the entries I'm less interested in make it run faster in the future as I add more entries?
Thanks for any advice.