are storage breakdowns available?

dankelley
I am new to zotero, and liking it very much. I like to have my papers in Dropbox, and so I am inserting them into zotero as link-style attachments. But the storage that I have used doesn't seem to be consistent with that; it seems that the storage may be the actual file size, not a link size. Is there a way for me to see a breakdown of my zotero storage, so that I can check on my hypothesis?

PS. I don't mind buying a zotero subscription, but I have loads of Dropbox space available, and I like using it because of the ability to retrieve accidentally-deleted files, etc.
  • adamsmith
    I'm guessing you're seeing the Webpage Snapshots, which can take up a fair amount of space. If you don't need those synced, you can simply turn off file sync in the Sync tab of the Zotero preferences and you won't need any storage -- file links (and metadata) sync for free and don't count towards the storage.

    As for your question, Zotero doesn't have a storage breakdown, but you can simply run a disk space analyzer on the "storage" subdirectory of the Zotero data folder: https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data
  • dankelley
    Thanks. I see about 1 to 2Mb of storage per webpage ... and that's just the javascript and css. Is there a recommended way to prune this content? Basically, if I delete it in the OS, and then click the "synch" button in the (macos) zotero app, will I upset the database?
  • adamsmith
    no you won't upset the DB by deleting the files, but again, if the problem isn't local storage but just sync, you can separately disable file sync in the Zotero preferences.
  • dankelley
    Thanks very much for your help. In case it helps anyone, here was my procedure, which seems to work.

    FIRST, I used

    du storage | sort -nk 1

    to find some big PDF files. (This could be done in a gui, of course.)

    SECOND, for each large storage/HASHCODE subdirectory, I took the following steps.

    1. In the OS, copy the large PDF from storage/HASHCODE to a dropbox location.

    2. In zotero, delete the PDF (and web snapshot) to the trash.

    3. In zotero, empty the trash.

    3. In zotero, add the PDF back as an attachment to the bib reference, but this time as a *link*, not as a copied file.

    The other thing to note is that I did the following, to prevent this bloat in the future:

    4. In zotero, select "preferences" and then select "sync". Then uncheck the boxes beside the following items:

    * Sync automatically
    * Sync full-text content
    * Sync attachment files in My Library using [Zotero]
    * Sync attachment files in group libraries using Zotero storage

    5. In zotero, select "preferences" and then select "general", and uncheck the box at the item labelled

    * Automatically take snapshots when creating items from web pages
  • adamsmith
    OK, but now you have sync completely turned off. I'd recommend not relying on manual sync and only disabling the third of the four options, which is the only relevant option affecting file sync (technically so does the fourth one, but if you do need files in groups, there's no alternative to Zotero file sync).
  • dankelley
    Will do. Thanks again -- it's very kind of you to help, and to do so with such patience.
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