I have been wanting to use Zotero now for a while for my reference library but could never work out how back up my library using subversion. My life is contained within subversion, I do not know how I could have possibly survived before all my work; code, presentations, papers, images and not to mention my thesis, is all perfectly backed up and re-visioned and floating happily in the cloud available to me from any machine. Zotero installs itself inside the firefox profile which makes it difficult to revision within the C:\\my-subversion” folder. What I decided to do was to create a new firefox profile (instructions here) within my-subversion folder then install zotero creating:
C:\\my-subversion\firefoxprofile\zotero
I then only added the zotero folder to my subversion repository. You could always revision your firefox profile but I decided not to. Now every time I add a new item to zotero the my-subversion folder indicates there has been a change and requires a commit. Obviously every time you add a pdf file to the library you will actually have to “SVN add” the file itself. This is not a problem for me as I try to keep my library light and not store to many pdfs.
I am also going to try and use zotero as an interface to my subversion repository, describing and tagging documents and code that I write, but more specifically presentations, so no more trying to work out what is contained in “Presentation1.ppt” or what file name I gave to that talk on data standards which I have to give tomorrow!
I am tagging my hard drive via Zotero, its just one big cloud.
fgibson.com 
#1 by Neil on February 22, 2008 - 10:37 pm
In Zotero’s preferences->advanced, you can change the location of the storage directory; it doesn’t have to be in your profile directory.
On LInux, I’ve tried keeping mine on a NFS-mount for network access by other machines.
#2 by noksagt on February 23, 2008 - 3:53 am
Building on Neil’s idea: You can setup Apache to host a DAV+SVN directory. Every major OS lets you treat WebDAV as a network drive. This means you’ll have automatic versioning, without having to manually commit anything.
#3 by peanutbutter on February 24, 2008 - 10:01 am
Thanks for the tips Neil and noksagt. I can not believe I missed the option to change the location of the storage directory. That is definitely much simpler than what I tried to do.