Sync Stories is a column dedicated to our users. Each week, we showcase a different use case for BitTorrent Sync and the personal stories behind it.

In this week’s edition: engineer Chris Salter shows how a combination of research tool Zotero and BitTorrent Sync allows him to manage his academic research effectively, keeping everything synchronized and available any time, across all his devices.
From Chris:

I’m a Fire and Explosion engineer, who completed his PhD at Loughborough University investigating the economic cost of fire within the UK. I’m now a consultant working on fire protection to new build structures within London and the rest of the world. I also work alongside Imperial College London on fire engineering research.
Use Case

As an academic (and now a consultant), I’m required to keep up with the latest developments within my industry. Usually this means reading recent, scientific publications to keep abreast of all the research being undertaken by universities around the world. As part of this, my work involves having to constantly referencing previous work – created by others – to allow me to make arguments based on scientific evidence. And in the case of writing my own reports and journal papers, to ensure that I’m not accused of plagiarising and to allow my readers to check other peoples’ research.

For this, I discovered Zotero. Zotero links into my favourite browser (or has a standalone version) and basically stores a database of all the papers, books, documents and websites that I want to reference. Zotero syncs the metadata of the documents via its server to different installations if you create an account. However, the documents themselves do not sync, unless you pay for the additional space (you do get 300MB of free space, but I’ve got a collection of 900MB of papers!) Whilst the metadata sync is good, I want to be up to date on all my computers so that if I need to refer to a paper, I can regardless of where I am.

Other referencing software lets you create your own folder layout and point their database to that – for example, you would be able to add your papers to a Dropbox folder and let Dropbox sync the files for you. This is how I completed my PhD, using Jabref and my own folder structure. However, Zotero is more robust and creates its own filing structure. This took some getting used to and made my syncing method redundant. I also had the issue that I use all three major operating systems and any method needed to be cross platform.