Groups, local document management, and backups

awalters_cawst
Some of my colleagues are looking at using Zotero (collaboratively, with a group library), and they've asked me for input from the IT/Admin side. A couple of factors in our environment:

1. Our network connection is poor, so we try to keep as much local as possible.

2. We're in the process of implementing a local document management solution for versioning, better indexing/tagging, etc...of all of our internal documents.

I've seen on other forum posts that Zotero does not currently support relative links for Groups, and therefore there is no ability to have Zotero pull from a shared local repository for file storage. This would be our ideal solution, as we could just have everything on our local document management server; it would not use external bandwidth, it would be backed up with the rest of our docs, and it could still be part of our overall document management solution so it could be searched with all the other documents outside of Zotero.

Since that's not an option, are there any ways I can work around this that still allow for local file storage for the Group? If not, I'm wondering about perhaps somehow setting up a sync from the Group Library in Zotero to a network folder, to at least allow for backups. (I'm mostly concerned about accidental deletion, here - and we don't back up individual machines, only servers.) If I could sync to the server somehow, it might also allow for the files to still be a part of the management system as well - though I'd have to do some testing there.

I'd love to hear any ideas people might have. A couple of people have been using this individually as a test, and really like it, but if we can't mitigate some of these concerns in a group setting they may be dealbreakers. Thank you!
  • adamsmith
    Apart from setting up the Zotero server locally -- which is possible but a substantial technical investment -- I'm not aware of a viable group solution not using Zotero server, no. Using "Download as needed" as a sync setting will save bandwith as it prevents unneeded downloads.

    It's absolutely possible to set up regular one-way sync of the locally stored Zotero database to a remote location, including a server. A typical setup would be a cron job with rsync, which is basically what Mac's Time Machine does. That's the recommended set-up for Zotero back-ups anyway. No reason not to set that to run every 15mins or so.
  • awalters_cawst
    Great - I'll look into the rsync or similar possibility (I'd been thinking about running the program somewhere and setting it to sync to the server, but direct access seems easier if it's allowed). It seems like that would mitigate the backup concern, and *possibly* the document management system concern, although I'll have to test further on that front.

    I guess if I'm syncing there, I can just set everyone's endpoints to download the file only if used - that should help on the bandwidth front (and the minimizing storage needs on their local machines front, which I forgot to mention - they're mostly using light travel laptops with SSDs). The only thing it doesn't do is pull from a local file instead of external when they do go to open it, but I guess I can live with that if I let them know that they should only do that when necessary...

    I'll review with the team and see if we can make this work. Thanks! If anyone's got any other tips about managing this sort of situation I definitely appreciate any additional suggestions. :-)
  • awalters_cawst
    Oh, I just re-read. You're saying I'd have to do the sync from someone's local store of docs, not directly from the server, correct? So at least one person has to have enough disk space for all the files, and be taking the processing hit of syncing all the files down, and then back out to the server? Since all of our staff are on small laptops, and many of them travel frequently, this could be tricky. Is there any way to script a direct sync from the server?
  • adamsmith
    Not really, no. But the recommended setup would be to have one institutional account anyway (e.g. so that you don't have to deal with group transfer if someone leaves the organization) -- couldn't that be on a local desktop or so?
  • awalters_cawst
    Oh - we'd assumed that we'd have individual accounts, but multiple people as admins of the group to deal with the group transfer if someone leaves. Is that not possible?

    We actually don't have a local desktop - everyone is on laptops. I guess I could maybe track down some old hardware somewhere for the purpose. Does it only sync when someone's using the software? So basically we'd have to just have it on and running somewhere, with Zotero just open all the time? And it could never sleep, presumably?
  • adamsmith
    You can have multiple admins, but only one owner, who handles payments etc. I'd recommend having that not tied to an individual account -- we often see problems when those people leave.

    Whether it needs to be on all the time depends on whether you want backups at all times. Since it also just syncs to/from the Zotero server, it doesn't need to run for Zotero sync to work, but obviously if you're using this to create backups locally, those only get created as long as it's running. Does that makes sense?
  • awalters_cawst
    Right - if we just wanted everything automated though, it would have to be running (unless I could script opening it up and waiting for the sync, but that seems excessive). I just don't like the idea of having a computer on and not sleeping all the time just for this, but I guess I could make sure that the hardware I find has wake on LAN, and do some additional scripting around that. Just a bit more work than I was hoping for. :-) Okay; I'll do some more thought on our end around this. Thank you.

    And thanks for the heads up about the users; I'd asked them to ensure that there could be multiple admins for this purpose, but I didn't realise that there was a distinction between admin and owner, and that there could only be one owner.
  • awalters_cawst
    Also, just looking at the files that are syncing to our test user's local computer, and they're all in folders with nonsense names, rather than the "folders" they're being organized into in Zotero. Is this normal? For document management purposes, this adds another complication as well.
  • adamsmith
    yes, that's normal. (Zotero collections aren't really folders, btw. They function more like playlists, allowing multiple membership etc.)
  • awalters_cawst
    Hmmm...okay. That makes things more challenging for us as well. Guess I have my work cut out for me if we're going to go ahead with this. Thank you for the info!
  • DWL-SDCA
    I work with folks who are in rural areas who have very slow, lossy internet connections. They don't have serious issues using the regular Zotero sync system. Perhaps, you should try using the Zotero sync and storage with groups as an experiment. Poor local network connection notwithstanding, those travelers using notebook machines would always have access to current material. (If your concerns are more security-related, that is a different issue.)
  • awalters_cawst
    Security isn't really an issue for us on this, so we certainly can use the cloud storage on that front. Bandwidth is a concern, so it's nice to hear that that might not be too bad. Thanks! (Although I'm told there's going to be some pretty hefty PDFs stored, so it'll be interesting to see.) The other concerns though are the ability to restore something someone's accidentally deleted, and to be able to have these files centralized and managed with the rest of our document management system. (This is just one small team of our org using Zotero - most of the rest of the org doesn't need anything like it, but sometimes needs to be able to find/search the PDFs, as well as hundreds of gigs of other internal resources. So it's not an option to move everything to this system...just this one area needs overlap in both systems.)
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