Multiple computers, multiple Zotero directories on an external drive?

machadorobert
edited January 10, 2020
I use Zotero on 4 computers, each mine (in different offices). Currently, I have a Zotero directory on each computer hard drive and back up each directory using cloud storage. I'm considering, however, moving my directories onto an external drive. My question is should I have then 4 different Zotero directories on this external drive, or could I simply 1) create a new empty directory 2) copy all Zotero directory contents from each computer into this new directory 3) point Zotero to this directory? I'm not sure if copying multiple directories into a single folder might cause problems for Zotero. The impetus for this is to be able to just back up one folder and to be able to scan that folder for duplicate files. I'm confident that I've got lots of duplicate PDFs, etc. Thanks! Robert
  • dstillman
    I'm not sure I'm understanding this. Are the four computers currently using Zotero syncing, or are they separate, unrelated libraries? You certainly can't just combine separate data directories in the filesystem — actual Zotero data (not attachments) are in a database, which would be different on each system.

    If you want to use an external drive and shuttle it between the machines instead of using Zotero syncing, you can, but without using syncing you'd need to choose one of the four directories as the directory to keep going forward.
  • machadorobert
    Correct, the 4 computers are using syncing and the same library. Each Zotero directory on each computer differs in size, however, often by a lot. I just want to find the best and most efficient way of managing a backup (or backups) of my Zotero directories given my multiple computer use. Thanks again.
  • dstillman
    If you're happy using syncing, I would just pick one of the computers that has file syncing set to "at sync time" rather than "as needed" and make sure its Zotero data directory is included in a backup, and exclude the data directory from backups on any other computers.

    If you find that some data is missing on some of the computers, that'd be a separate issue that we could address, but I wouldn't worry about it in terms of backups — you obviously want to make sure in general that your data is syncing to all your computers. (The size difference here could be because of on-demand file syncing or due to differences in full-text content indexing.)
  • machadorobert
    Got it, will do. Thanks so much Dan. -R
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