Upgrade StorageRequest: Storage options
Hi All,
I use Zotero for a lot of things. I have more or less solved the problem of duplicate files on my harddrive by keeping the "originals" on external storage. But I'm still expecting my Zotero Library to get quite big and I'm starting to want to plan ahead for what to do when that happens. I've probably read too much of the documentation on the site about file storage options and I think that I'm just confused at this point, haha. So I figured I'd just ask my questions directly and see what happened.
For Context, I was keeping Zotero pretty much solely for use with my school library. This summer I decided to bite the bullet and integrate my personal and work reference libraries as well. I foresee that getting to be a space problem eventually and I would like to have some plans for what to do when that happenes.
Also, I suspect the size of my library might be slowing things down a bit. Any solutions that address this are also welcome
I was thinking that it might be nice to separate my library into two big groups (School vs Work vs Personal) and manipulate them indepenently?
Is there a way to export my current zotero library to a file sharing service that it can still access locally? Could I host it solely from the cloud after a certain point? How about solely from external storage?
What are some solutions you all have tried?
Given my usage case, what would yall recommend?
Right now I'm just going to make separate work, school, and personal reference collections and upload my files from there. I'm mostly concerned about somehow messing up zoteros internal links to all my pdfs, annotations etc. in the future.
Thanks in advance. :)
I use Zotero for a lot of things. I have more or less solved the problem of duplicate files on my harddrive by keeping the "originals" on external storage. But I'm still expecting my Zotero Library to get quite big and I'm starting to want to plan ahead for what to do when that happens. I've probably read too much of the documentation on the site about file storage options and I think that I'm just confused at this point, haha. So I figured I'd just ask my questions directly and see what happened.
For Context, I was keeping Zotero pretty much solely for use with my school library. This summer I decided to bite the bullet and integrate my personal and work reference libraries as well. I foresee that getting to be a space problem eventually and I would like to have some plans for what to do when that happenes.
Also, I suspect the size of my library might be slowing things down a bit. Any solutions that address this are also welcome
I was thinking that it might be nice to separate my library into two big groups (School vs Work vs Personal) and manipulate them indepenently?
Is there a way to export my current zotero library to a file sharing service that it can still access locally? Could I host it solely from the cloud after a certain point? How about solely from external storage?
What are some solutions you all have tried?
Given my usage case, what would yall recommend?
Right now I'm just going to make separate work, school, and personal reference collections and upload my files from there. I'm mostly concerned about somehow messing up zoteros internal links to all my pdfs, annotations etc. in the future.
Thanks in advance. :)
While you can create multiple profiles pointing to different data directories, that's an advanced configuration, harder to work with, and not something we generally recommend.
Zotero 7, which will be in beta soon, will be much faster, so I wouldn't worry about performance until you've tried that.
I'm not totally clear what you're doing for storage, but if you're using stored files, an upcoming version will let you tell Zotero how many days to store local copies of uploaded files when using the "as needed" file-sync mode in order to free up local disk space. I'm not sure what you mean by this. What duplicates? If you're using stored files, those are stored within Zotero's data directory, and there's no need to keep other copies (though you should always back up your data).
Zotero 'file' syncing (PDFs) can be done in several ways, including zotero storage, webdav or linked files. Each has pros and cons that need to be fully understood.
https://www.zotero.org/support/sync#file_syncing
https://www.zotero.org/support/attaching_files#linked_files
Linked file setups are usually achieved with Zotfile. You are responsible for syncing, eg by setting PDFs to be stored by Zotfile in a cloud folder, and telling Zotero to look there for such files. There are some limitations of linked file setups (eg no Groups, no Zotero iOS app). In general it's an 'advanced user' option, for those who can live with the limitations.
Whichever way you go, you still need to have backups of everything.