Upgrade StorageRemove unsynced group libraries from local client
I might be missing something obvious but I remember that in the past a group library disappeared from the local client when I turned off syncing for this group in the preferences. Yet, this is not the case (anymore?). In the absence of such behaviour, how do I remove group libraries from my local client without leaving the group?
To free up local disk space, you can use Show File and delete the files manually from disk. You certainly don't want to delete them from Zotero unless you want to actually delete the contents of the group library.
- as far as I understand selective syncing, deleting references and attachments from an unsynced group should propagate to the serves, as long as sync is turned off for this group library. Your comment, however, points into the opposite direction. Is that so?
- selectively deleting attachments from a group with c. 20k references is too tedious a manual task but since attachments are not organised into groups on the local file system, I would rather delete all attachments from all groups and my main library by emptying the main attachment folder on my hard drive. As sync is set to automatically download attachments, the deleted files should be automatically downloaded from the Zotero servers upon the next sync. Is this correct?
I cannot but note that this will create a lot of rather unnecessary traffic and energy consumption, which I would like to avoid without having to resort to manually locate tens of thousands of attachments.
But yes, you can search for all PDFs or all large files within 'storage' and delete them on disk outside of Zotero. Don't delete the 'storage' subfolders themselves. I'd recommend doing Reset File Sync History from the Sync → Reset pane of the Zotero preferences to force Zotero to recheck that all files have been uploaded.
(An upcoming version of Zotero will allow you to set how many days to keep downloaded files when using "download as needed" mode in order to save local disk space, and it will automatically confirm that files have been uploaded before deleting them.) You might need to reset file sync history again to force them to redownload. Or you can just let them be redownloaded when you try to open them — Zotero will automatically redownload a file when you try to open it, regardless of the download setting.