Creating My Own File Structure for Zotero
This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.
- Everything that resides on ZFS also resides on every client.
- If one changes the server from ZFS to a WebDAV server, sync will automatically store everything, including all copied attachments, on the WebDAV.
From the above, it follows that the way to move attachments from ZFS to WebDAV so that they can also be accessed outside Zotero is:Just try it out and keep good back-ups.
The reason, I am saying without creating duplicates is that I think zotfile or zotero created duplicate sub folders in my "storage" folder located in the main zotero folder which I moved from Firefox to a location in my documents. In this "storage" folder located my "my documents" (not the one on google drive), I have over 1204 sub folders; yet I only have 914 files (references) both in my online and standalone libraries. Now I am wondering where the 1024 sub folders could have come from??? It makes be believe that I might have done something wrong; thereby creating duplicate folders (to a tune of 1024) and yet, they are too many for me to check each one of them independently and delete any duplicates manually.
The other thing is that when I moved my files to google drive using zotfile, some folders created there are empty (By this, I mean I commanded zotfile to rename my attachments using a folder structure, but some of the folders it created are empty without any attachments and yet I can see those attachments when I check my library. This also seems to suggest that when I eventually move those files to the zotero storage space I wish to purchase, I might as well lose those attachments since the folders created on google drive are empty (although I see some of the files in my library).
Many thanks to you all for the guidance provided on this forum. Your ideas are increasing my capacity to conduct research with less and less pain :)
so yes to this, with the exception of notes, which aren't files but part of your database.
In several instances, I've scanned edited collections and stored each contribution as a single pdf file within a common folder. For example, a single folder contains several contributions in the book "Money, Power and Space" edited by Stuart Corbridge, Nigel Thrift, and Ron Martin.
This creates two issues. First, each individual contributions needs its own reference item in Zotero, but this creates two logical places for pdf attachments: associated with the book or associated with the individual reference. I'd like to share the individual pdf files between the reference item for the book and the reference item for the individual book section. This way all the pdf files associated with the book would be attached to the book record, but so too would be each individual pdf and the record containing reference information for the specific item. Is there any way to do this?
Second, some of the individual pdfs pertain to the book itself. For instance, one pdf may contain front matter and another, back matter. If a book has multiple parts, each with a brief introduction, there may be pdf files for each part. So sometimes a book may have a half-dozen or so separate pdfs. When I import these files into Zotero, Zotfile renames them, and Zotero's "Rename file from parent metadata" option will too. I want to use uniform naming conventions so this is not bad, except for one thing. It would be nice to be able to edit the names of each of the multiple attachments so that one can tell what the attachment is. For example, instead of "Corbridge et al 1994 Money, Power and Space 4.pdf" I'd like the name to be "Corbridge et al 1994 Money, Power and Space - Backmatter.pdf." But I don't see any way to edit the name of the file manually within Zotero.
Thanks for your help.
2. You can simply click on the bolded filename on the right to change it.