I have over 1300 papers saved in Paperpile and it is starting to use up too much space on my Google Drive. I don’t want to have to pay for more storage if I don’t want to. I mainly use Paperpile as a knowledge management system – when I read a paper that I want to remember, I add it to my Paperpile, assign some labels for keywords, and maybe add a few notes. I don’t use Paperpile to read or annotate papers so I don’t have a need to download PDFs.
Is there a way to remove all existing PDFs? I have already disabled auto-download through Settings > General > PDF downloads. I also deleted all the PDFs in my Paperpile folder on Google Drive. However, the metadata for entries in my Paperpile still show that the papers have a PDF, and it appears that the PDFs were redownloaded somehow.
You need to disable Google Drive sync @rfriedman22. Deleting PDFs from Drive has no effect while sync is turned on because we resync your library from our servers. To disable sync, go to the Drive icon in your library and select Disable Sync.
I tried to do that, and it works, however, I don’t want to disable sync ever, I want to be able to disable the sync only for some files. Specifically, i would like to remove the pdf for all those files, and then disable sync/automatic re-download only for those. Is there a way to do this?
Welcome to our forum, @Giovanni_Palla. There is no way to restrict / customize sync like you suggest at the moment, so I have added the suggestion to our tracker. If you don’t mind losing those PDFs, deleting them directly from the Paperpile interface should do the trick — they will be gone from our servers as well.
