Syncing Groups separately

abayres · May 17, 2011

Is it possible in Zotero to sync group libraries independently of one another? Or at least independently of the personal library?

Assume we have two groups, "Test" and "Test 2". The goal here would be to sync the library from Group "Test" to the Zotero server without syncing the library from Group "Test 2"

The purpose is that we have people working on several different areas of a project, and we want to have different groups for each sub-section of the project. It would be nice, though, if those working in one group could sync their files/references without having to sync/download everything from each of the other (potentially many) groups each time.

If this is not possible, is the only other option to use multiple firefox persona, one for each group that we want to sync independently?

dstillman · May 17, 2011

I'm not totally clear on your use case here. You're saying that people would belong to multiple groups but wouldn't always need to download them? Why would they need to belong to the other groups? Is this for, say, temporary use on lab computers or something like that?

Note that on-demand downloading of files is planned, so at the very least it won't be necessary to download those unnecessarily.

abayres · May 17, 2011

The reason we would want to do this is mainly that the data volumes could potentially be large and change often. So, if someone working on, for example, Part 2 of a ten-part project (all in separate Zotero groups) wanted to upload new files/references to the Part 2 Zotero server without updating a potentially large amount of information from the other parts (that this person may nonetheless at some point want to access, thus they are part of all the groups and could sync when necessary), they could sync solely with the Part 2 group library, but leave the other group libraries unsynced. I'm not sure this would be such a large problem in practice, I just wanted to see if it were possible.

Thanks!

sethmg · May 19, 2011

I came across a similar problem today in my lab. We have a group that I and all of my colleagues are members of, one of my colleagues was having problems syncing the group and it turned out that her personal library had exceeded its 100 MB limit. When the sync process detected this it stopped altogether and didn't update the group library, which still has bout 9 GB of space in its quota.

It would be nice if the group library updated, even if the personal library encountered a problem.

Regards.

fbennett · May 19, 2011

If this is the case, it would explain a batch of empty attachment files that we recently purged from one of our groups here:

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/17990/empty-files-in-download/

The user concerned had exceeded the 100mb quota on their personal account, and their PC suffered hardware failure. Our user didn't have a backup (which is a problem), and when the attachments in the user's group didn't come back with a sync on the new PC, I assumed that file syncing hadn't been turned on on the old machine.

Again assuming that this is the behavior, I agree that it would be nice to allow group sync to go forward even if the personal account has exceeded quota.