Zotero

Zotero saves all of the information in your library on your local hard drive. For more info on this, see the next page "Zotero Data - On Your Computer". This is fine if you only use one device to access Zotero and/or do not want your Zotero data stored on US servers.

Most people choose to use the free cloud storage on Zotero's servers. This creates an always-up-to-date backup of your data. You can also sync your devices with the Zotero Cloud storage so that you will always be seeing the latest version of the data, no matter which computer or device you are using. It also allows you to create group libraries which can be shared with collaborators.

The following video walks you through the steps to set up your Zotero cloud storage. You can also see screenshots of the steps below.

To activate Zotero's cloud storage, you need to set up a Zotero account. If you have not already set up an account, go to the Zotero website, and clicking Log In in the upper right corner of the page.

To learn more about setting up a Zotero account, see the Create a Zotero Account page.

To use Zotero's cloud storage, sync your Zotero library to your Zotero account. Select the sync icon in the upper right corner of your Zotero library then open Sync preferences.

Next enter your Zotero username and password to connect to your cloud storage space.

Now you can use Zotero on multiple computers, create Zotero Group libraries, and use Zotero's cloud storage to back up your data.

You can choose which data gets backed up in the Zotero Preferences settings. There are two kinds of data that Zotero can sync. You will probably want to sync them both.

1. Metadata

• This is plain descriptive data associated with all of the citations you have such as the titles, authors, journal titles, tags and notes you have for those citations. 
• Metadata is synced on Zotero’s servers and there is no limit to how much of this kind of data you can store on Zotero’s servers and therefore sync across multiple computers.

2. Files

• These are the attachments your citations may have, such as PDFs or screenshots. 
• These files can quickly take up a lot of space, so Zotero only gives users 300 MB free cloud space for this type of data.  To give you an idea of how much 300 MB is, a general rule of thumb is that one PDF averages 1 MB.
• If you need to access more than 300 MB of space from multiple computers or intend to use larger Zotero Group libraries, you will need to pay for additional Zotero storage.