syncing local library

bcullis
Hi All
I am a newbee to Zotero, but am super impressed. Have come across from Mendeley, and I have some old habits which are hard to break. One is syncing my library to my laptop. With Mendeley that was easy, but I cannot find a way to to this automatically in Zotero, other than doing it manually via File>Export Library
There must be a neat way to do this
cheers
Brian
  • dstillman
    edited July 8, 2022
    Just enter your username and password in the Sync pane of the preferences.

    https://www.zotero.org/support/sync
  • bcullis
    hi
    thanks. I was already signed in. What is challenging me is where Zetero saves the local copy of My Library - that is where is the path, eg ~/Documents. I must be missing something!
    cheers
  • dstillman
    Everything is stored in your Zotero data directory (~/Zotero) by default, but that's not really related to syncing.
  • bcullis
    hmmm
    well I am puzzled.....
    maybe the only way is to do it manually the way I am doing it.
    it works but seems clunky
    thanks
  • dstillman
    edited July 8, 2022
    I don't know what you mean by that. This just works — you literally just put in your username and password on each device and Zotero takes cares of everything else for you, making all your data and files available on each device.
  • bcullis
    sorry
    maybe I need to be more explicit.
    When I am preparing a LaTeX document and point to the bibliography something like this
    \bibliography{/home/brian/Documents/zotero}
    I exported My Library to create the file called zotero.bib using the file>Export Library option. If I did not do this then BiBTeX cannot locate the bibliography file. Maybe I am doing this in a silly way, but it the way I have done it for years.
  • dstillman
    edited July 8, 2022
    Yeah, you're thinking about this wrong. Don't use export for this (or almost anything, really).

    Zotero has your data and manages everything for you, including syncing between devices.

    If you're using a BibTeX-based workflow, you want to install the Better BibTeX plugin, which can automatically maintain a .bib file for you in a location of your choosing as you make changes in your Zotero library. It's vastly more powerful than the BibTeX functionality in Mendeley. But again, this has nothing to do with syncing.
  • bcullis
    thanks
    well I am on the right track as I have installed the plug in & have drilled down in the edit>preferences>Better BibTeX, but cannot see how one maintains a .bib file on the available options
  • dstillman
    https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/exporting/auto/
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