Allowing third-party cloud storage for sync/attachments

wonblee · October 24, 2010

I'm in the process of moving a large portion of my reference materials to Google Docs, so that I won't be bound by the size of the USB drive on the road. This lead me to think how wonderful it would be if Zotero allowed third-party cloud storage as source of attachments, or even for syncing. If this is permitted, people like me will be able to avoid paying double for Zotero storage and Google Docs storage.

adamsmith · October 24, 2010

Zotero does allow third party storage. You can use any WebDav service for most of the functionality. See multiple files on this on this forum. Because Zotero sync does more than just dump some data on a server, not any online storage will do, so google doc storage probably doesn't work (i haven't checked), but maybe google will offer WebDav services in the future.

Zotero has also published it's server-side code, so that in principal third parties could offer full-function Zotero storage and syncing.

wonblee · October 25, 2010

Yes, I understand that Zotero allows third party storage. But my proposal was to eliminate the use of a local drive entirely when a third-party storage (such as a WebDav service) is used. Is that how Zotero works currently? Maybe I'm mistaken.

adamsmith · October 25, 2010

ah that wasn't clear. That won't happen that way - as I said, syncing is more complicated - you can in principal do something similar with links (rather than store) if the cloud-storage is set up correctly (i.e. allows direct links).

Alternatively you can sync without files and (using Zotero Storage) access the files online - once Zotero Everywhere is fully roled out you can also add files online - that's currently not possible.