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Introduction

The free tier of your Zotero account includes 300 MB storage. 300 MB is enough to synchronize hundreds of thousands of citations and PDF annotations with your Zotero account. To see how much storage you have used, log into https://zotero.org/ and click Settings -> Storage.

By default, however, Zotero also synchronizes PDFs and other attachments associated with your citations. As some PDFs can be 10 MB or more, you might find yourself running out of space quickly.

If you are running out of space, you can either:

  • purchase more storage from Zotero, starting at $20 USD / year for 2 GB of storage (enough for most users); or
  • prevent Zotero from synchronizing PDFs and other attachments.

    The drawback to this option is that not synchronizing PDFs makes it harder to work with Zotero on multiple computers. Zotero needs the PDFs locally to create a searchable full-text index, so if you do not synchronize the PDFs, then you can only search the subset of PDFs that were downloaded to each computer. Similarly, if you lose access to your computer (for example, if the hard drive fails), then when you synchronize with your Zotero account you will have to manually download all of the PDFs and other attachments again.

The following steps document how to prevent Zotero from synchronizing PDFs and other attachments.

Step 1

i.    On a Windows machine (left) open the Zotero icon on your desktop. At the top left, click on Edit then select  Preferences. On an Apple Mac (right),  go to Zotero on the top left of your screen,  then click Preferences, second line down)
 

Step 2

At the General tab (top left), uncheck the options that allow for the automatic attachment of .PDFs as well as the automatic retrieval of metadata. To repeat, while there are no limits on the data sync, you only are given 300MB of free storage space for your attachments.

Step 3

Set your username and password on the Sync tab in the Zotero preferences. This will allow you to access Zotero on whatever computer you happen to be using.

Step 4

Click Set Up Syncing and then Unclick Sync Full-Text Content as well as Sync Attachment files.

Step 5

Click Advanced and then in the Resolver line type: https://omni.laurentian.ca/openurl/01OCUL_LU/01OCUL_LU:OMNI . This will enable Zotero's Library Lookup service to find full-text documents licensed by Laurentian University.