Upgrade StorageMendeley to Zotero. Through BibTex
1. I was a long time Mendeley user. I had tried Zotero for a while, but found it messy and not fitting my work habits. Also, I have a strong preference for desktop apps.
2. After Mendeley was acquired by Elsevier, nothing that was important to me (e.g. advanced search features) was improved or implemented. Over the years, Mendeley performance declined, the links became broken, and program crashed nearly every day. The encryption of my personal file, without previous notice, was a deal-breaker, and I decided to change the program. Luckily, Zotero improved a lot and changed into a desktop app. Luckily too, I wasn't using pdf annotations in Mendeley (I keep notes separately in Connected Text (http://connectedtext.com/).
Here's the story of my transition.
3. Unfortunately, the method described in the documentation didn't work. My database was large (10K entries), and half of the entries had attachments. I keep the files in my local structure of folders (based on language, date and topic), and use EVERYTHING (https://www.voidtools.com/) to search for them. Changing this system is too much trouble.
I downgraded the database, but the links to local files were not preserved. I've tried to upload some of the files to Mendeley cloud service, and than re-synchronize. It works for normal database, but not for the downgraded one. During the synchronization, files are copied to Mendeley's own folder, breaking the folder structure.
4. As a solution, I have tried exporting entries through BibText file. Some data is lost this way, but nothing very important to me, e.g. date of first edition, ownership. The only important problem are diacritics, because Bibtext use simple latin alphabet. So after exporting, I had to edit the file with text editor, changing all the special marks into proper letters (ąźśłó).
5. Bibtext export do not preserve your Mendeley folder structure. To keep the collections intact, I had to tag all the items with the name of the collection (e.g. Collection_Political_Philosophy). Batch editing is super-simple in Mendeley, and I hope it will get better in Zotero.
5. Importing Bibtext file into Zotero took ages (>24 h), but it did what I wanted. All entries, with links to local files in my own folders, were preserved. Finally, I filtered all items with Collection_ tags, and recreate the folder structure in Zotero
2. After Mendeley was acquired by Elsevier, nothing that was important to me (e.g. advanced search features) was improved or implemented. Over the years, Mendeley performance declined, the links became broken, and program crashed nearly every day. The encryption of my personal file, without previous notice, was a deal-breaker, and I decided to change the program. Luckily, Zotero improved a lot and changed into a desktop app. Luckily too, I wasn't using pdf annotations in Mendeley (I keep notes separately in Connected Text (http://connectedtext.com/).
Here's the story of my transition.
3. Unfortunately, the method described in the documentation didn't work. My database was large (10K entries), and half of the entries had attachments. I keep the files in my local structure of folders (based on language, date and topic), and use EVERYTHING (https://www.voidtools.com/) to search for them. Changing this system is too much trouble.
I downgraded the database, but the links to local files were not preserved. I've tried to upload some of the files to Mendeley cloud service, and than re-synchronize. It works for normal database, but not for the downgraded one. During the synchronization, files are copied to Mendeley's own folder, breaking the folder structure.
4. As a solution, I have tried exporting entries through BibText file. Some data is lost this way, but nothing very important to me, e.g. date of first edition, ownership. The only important problem are diacritics, because Bibtext use simple latin alphabet. So after exporting, I had to edit the file with text editor, changing all the special marks into proper letters (ąźśłó).
5. Bibtext export do not preserve your Mendeley folder structure. To keep the collections intact, I had to tag all the items with the name of the collection (e.g. Collection_Political_Philosophy). Batch editing is super-simple in Mendeley, and I hope it will get better in Zotero.
5. Importing Bibtext file into Zotero took ages (>24 h), but it did what I wanted. All entries, with links to local files in my own folders, were preserved. Finally, I filtered all items with Collection_ tags, and recreate the folder structure in Zotero
@article{,
title = {{T{\'{e}}st}}
}
This imports into Zotero as "Tést".
E.g. I got: "Ani ksi\c a\.z\c e, ani kupiec: obywatel" insted of "Ani książę, ani kupiec: obywatel".