Upgrading zotero.sqlite from version 4.0 to 6.0 directly (skipping Zotero 5)

edited March 31, 2022
After so many years, I can finally decide to upgrade my old Zotero 4 within Firefox to Zotero 6, in order to enjoy the built-in PDF reader. Now the zotero.sqlite is located in \PortableApps\FirefoxPortableESR\Data\profile\zotero\, and I'm copying all the contents within this folder to Zotero 6's data directory (e.g., \PortableApps\ZoteroPortable\Data\profile\).

According to previous discussions (such as https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/88182/this-zotero-database-requires-zotero-5-0-97-beta-1-586a6f1dd-or-later) and https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/newer_db_version, there seems to be 2 major upgrades to the version of Zotero database zotero.sqlite: one is from 4.0.xx to 5.0, and another is from 5.0.9x to 5.0.97-beta.1+586a6f1dd. So if I want to upgrade a zotero.sqlite used by Zotero 4 to a version used by 6.0 release channel, should I upgrade it to 5.0 first, followed by a 2nd upgrade to 6.0? Or will Zotero 6.0 be able to upgrade the zotero.sqlite directly from 4.0 to 6.0 without any issue?
  • It's not something we regularly test, but yes, you should be able to upgrade directly from 4.0.
  • edited April 1, 2022
    Thanks for your confirmation!

    On the other hand, regarding migrating the preferences and profile (not just the data directory and zotero.sqlite) of Zotero 4 for Firefox to another folder and upgrading them to Zotero 6 standalone, I'm wondering how to easily do it without manually setting Zotero's preferences one-by-one in the UI window (when eyeballing two preferences UI windows of Zotero 4 and 6, and copying the checkboxes & text fields from one preferences UI window to the other). For my use case, it seems that some preferences of Zotero 4 for Firefox are stored in \PortableApps\FirefoxPortableESR\Data\profile\prefs.js, which also contains quite a lot of other settings for Firefox and other extensions. However, preferences of Zotero 5 & 6 are stored in \PortableApps\ZoteroPortable\Data\Mozilla\Profile\prefs.js, which doesn't contain too many stuffs other than those related to Zotero. So how can I migrate the preferences of Zotero 4 for Firefox to another location for use with Zotero 6 (without setting them one-by-one manually by eyeballing 2 UI windows)?

    This is crucial because for Zotero Better Bibtex, its preferences UI window & tabs contain too many options to manually set one-by-one, and I have too many automatic export in Better Bibtex, which is impractical to manually set one-by-one. It seems that Better Bibtex has a "better-bibtex" folder and several "betterbibtex.sqlite.bak"-like files under my Zotero data directory \PortableApps\FirefoxPortableESR\Data\profile\zotero. If the automatic exports are stored in these files & folder, then probably it's OK to simply copy all the contents from the old Zotero data directory to the new one for Zotero 6 (but please correct me if it's not the case). But if the automatic exports are stored in somewhere else, it would be terrible, and I've no idea about how to migrate them...
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