Syncing only certain files

Hi all,

I have a huge library, over 600 items, because I add every article that interests me to Zotero, and I plan to continue this policy. Zotero then saves the data, a snapshot and a PDF it downloads from the online journal site. I don't want to sync these to the Zotero File Storage. I don't need those synced, because I can access them basically at any time I like, because my university has a good VPN system. I don't want to delete them from my computer, because it is nice to have them around when I am not online with the VPN client.

But, I often use the marking feature in the HTML attachments, and then save the HTML attachment with my marks as new snapshots, because this is the only safe way I found to not loose my marks - zotero sometimes saves to marks in the original snapshot, but sometimes it does not.
It is these new HTML snapshots I would like to sync to the file storage. If I use regular file syncing, my files exceed the 100MB limit by far, because of all the PDFs and unmarked snapshots.

So, how do I specifically sync my marked snapshots? I don't want to carry around a print out of each paper with the relevant passages marked.
  • Short answer: you cannot.

    Three possibly slightly more helpful answers:
    1. manually add those items to a group library - as you can choose to sync group libraries to zotero storage but not your own user library (you could use a closed one-person group)
    2. store your pdfs as links to the downloaded files rather than as attachments. This way they won't take up any space
    3. sync to a WebDAV server (as opposed to zotero storage). Your University might offer WebDAV access or you might have some other webhosting provider or such. Alternatively, you could use my phpZoteroWebDAV script to set up zotero WebDAV storage on any php enabled webserver you might control.
  • P.S. It seems that the reason why you would want to sync is so that you can view your attachments on any internet connected computer through zotero.org. If this is the case I should let you know that it is not (currently?) possible to view web snapshot attachments (annotated or otherwise) through the library view on zotero.org
    My tool, phpZoteroWebDAV, has limited support for viewing web snaphots. These limitations are mainly apparent with annotated web snapshots due to the way zotero stores the annotations. (I have yet to come across a case where viewing of non-annotated web snapshots fails)
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