It is vitally important that you protect all the work you have put into developing your Mendeley library.  If you lose your Mendeley library it could delay your assignment or research.

Mendeley Desktop is fully synchronised with your online Mendeley account whenever you are connected to the internet.  Your references will be stored in the cloud. However please note that a synchronisation is not the same as a backup. For example, if references were accidentally deleted in Mendeley Desktop, this error would be synchronised to Mendeley online, and thus the online account can't be relied upon for this type of data recovery.

For complete security you should also regularly make a backup of your Mendeley library.  This will gather all the various parts of your library and compress them into a single .zip file.  This file should be stored in a physically separate place to your computer.

To create a .zip backup file click on the Help menu and then on Create Backup

It is vitally important that you protect all the work you have put into developing your Mendeley library.  If you lose your Mendeley library it could delay your assignment or research.

Mendeley Reference Manager is fully synchronised with your online Mendeley account whenever you are connected to the internet.  Your references will be stored in your online Mendeley account.

However note that a synchronisation is not the same as a backup. For example, if references were accidentally deleted in Mendeley Reference Manager, this error would be synchronised to Mendeley online, and thus the online account can't be relied upon for this type of data recovery. For complete security you should also regularly make a backup of your Mendeley library. 

Note this method does not retain citation keys, tags or PDFs; only the details of the reference in your Mendeley library. A full backup feature is not (yet) available in Mendeley Reference Manager. See our comparison of Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Reference Manager.

In All References, click File > Export All > RIS

This saves an RIS file containing the details of all references in your Mendeley Library. Should you lose data in your Mendeley Library, this RIS file could then be imported to recover the details of the references. RIS files do not contain PDFs.