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.