How do I remove group library from local computer without leaving group?

borque
Hi there,

I've used Zotero for several years now but have only started learning to use group libraries this year. I'm with an organization that has a very relatively large group library, and several months ago I joined that group and synced the group library to my local computer, not realizing that I would be downloading many thousands of PDFs.

I now want to remove the group library from my local computer - the PDFs are hogging space that I want to use for other things - but I'm concerned that I could accidentally delete things in the group library online, which would of course harm other people in my organization. At the same time, I don't want to leave this group, because I will need to have access to it in the future.

So my question is, how can I remove a group library safely from my local computer without leaving the group?

I did search through this forum before posting, but could only find posts from people who wanted to leave their groups.

In case it's helpful:
- OS: Windows 10 Home
- Zotero: 6.0.23

Thanks very much.
  • dstillman
    There's no easy way to do this at the moment, but we have two planned features that will address this:

    1) The ability to choose how many days to keep downloaded files for in order to save local disk space

    2) The ability to remove a local group entirely without leaving the group

    For now, you would want to change Zotero to download group files "as needed" from the Sync pane of the preferences and, if you can't wait, manually delete group files on disk. You can do that either by using right-click → Show File and deleting specific files in the filesystem or using your OS search to find all PDFs within the Zotero data directory and deleting those, which will remove local copies of files across all libraries. (For the latter option, you'd want to make sure all files in your personal library had been uploaded, but it looks like you're mostly not using Zotero Storage in your personal library.)

    Don't delete any actual attachment items in Zotero, since that will delete them for everyone in the group!
  • borque
    Thanks for the comment - I'm glad I asked, because that's exactly what I was concerned could happen.

    Just to make sure I understand, you're saying that deleting the PDFs using my OS/file explorer won't cause them to be deleted for everyone else? If so, that's probably my best option, because all of my personal library's PDFs are stored in a single folder using Zotfile. Thank heavens for my friend who taught me to use plugins from the very beginning haha
  • opcode
    I just had the same issue and wrote a little script to deal with the automated removal of local group content:
    https://github.com/opcode81/zotero-maintenance
  • ddileonardo
    @dstillman, thanks for your answer. I'm currently looking for the same thing because I have a lot of group libraries that I don't need on my local computer anymore, and I think it is making the Zotero Word extension slow to search for the references because the the volume of references.

    Is there any planned timeline for the features you mentioned?
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