My laptop crashed, my back up is corrupt. Help !

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by jeremysnana

The NTI sw said the back up was corrupt.
My laptop had been shut down since the previous night. All programs are closed prior to shut down.

@jeremysnana - were/are you using the continuous backup feature of NTI Backup? If so then I suggest you don't use that at the same time as calibre, see ==>> Frequently Asked Questions in particular :-

If you are using a file-syncing tool it is essential that you make sure that both calibre and the file syncing tool do not try to access the calibre library at the same time. In other words, do not run the file syncing tool and calibre at the same time.

Functionally NTI Backup Now incorporates a 'file-synching' tool.

BR

[JSWolf]

You are best to have at least two backups because if you backup from an unknown corruption, you then screw up one backup. The other backup would then be needed to restore from.

[fidvo]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You are best to have at least two backups because if you backup from an unknown corruption, you then screw up one backup. The other backup would then be needed to restore from.

The ideal backup system for the best security is to back up to a new location each time, and never delete your old backups. Even with two backups, errors in the main database can propagate to the backups and ruin them if you don't catch them soon enough. If you have all your backups ever since you started backing up, you can just restore the most recent backup before the problem occurred.

Obviously, this isn't practical in the real world, because it requires more hard drive space than the average user is likely to have.

The closest reasonable solution is rotating backups. For example, depending upon the situation, you might have a different backup for each day of the week, or a different backup for each day of the month. A variation of this would be to have a different backup for each day of the month, but the backup on the first day of the month gets rotated into a set of monthly backups for each month of the year.

A scheme like this would still probably take up too much space just to make sure your Calibre database is backed up properly. My point is that you have to find a system that works for you. You have to weigh the importance of the data against the hard drive space the backups would require.

[jeremysnana]

Originally Posted by darryl

NTI Backup now is a dedicated backup program. Where is it storing its backup? If you actually run this program you should see an interface to restore files. I don't know the particular program but you should have some way of picking a relevant backup file and of searching your actual backup for, say, mobi and other ebook files. Your only hope here is to be able to restore from a backup.

NTI is the sw on the Toshiba Canvio, and that restore is what said it was corrupt. Also where the Calibre Folder with just the book images in it was.

[eschwartz]

Regular backup snapshots do not need to take up more than 1X + new content space. A good backup system would hardlink backup files that haven't changed. Mike Rubel wrote up the initial guide: http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
and others have expanded/explained/modified it, example here: http://webgnuru.com/linux/rsync_incremental.php

This is also what Apple's Time Machine does.

[jeremysnana]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@jeremysnana - were/are you using the continuous backup feature of NTI Backup? If so then I suggest you don't use that at the same time as calibre, see ==>> Frequently Asked Questions in particular :-



Functionally NTI Backup Now incorporates a 'file-synching' tool.

BR

The EHD is where the NTI is running. If I understand what you are saying, the NTI is cosntantly running back up. I have noticed that it seems to light up a lot, so I assume that as I put my books back from my Kindles, and from Amazon Cloud, that is what it is doing.

I have been keeping the EHD connected constantly since recovering back to factory new status. Are you suggesting that I don't leave it connected while I am using Calibre?

I went to the link, and I see it suggests not running on more than one networked library. My laptop is connected to my home network, but Calibre is only on my laptop, and is not accessed by either of the other two computers on the network.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by jeremysnana

The EHD is where the NTI is running. If I understand what you are saying, the NTI is cosntantly running back up. I have noticed that it seems to light up a lot, so I assume that as I put my books back from my Kindles, and from Amazon Cloud, that is what it is doing.

I have been keeping the EHD connected constantly since recovering back to factory new status. Are you suggesting that I don't leave it connected while I am using Calibre?

I went to the link, and I see it suggests not running on more than one networked library. My laptop is connected to my home network, but Calibre is only on my laptop, and is not accessed by either of the other two computers on the network.

@jeremysnana - The reason I drew your attention to a specific couple of sentences in that FAQ section, was because its about the use of file synch products. Forget the network stuff for now

The NTI Backup Now web site refers to a Continuous Back feature (see first attachment), elsewhere its refers to a Sync/Continuous Backup Method (see second attachment)

Here's a recent thread where a calibre user lost some books ==>> Disappearing Books. I'm reasonably confident the disappearing books was caused by running Apple's Time Machine/Capsule and calibre concurrently, the OP (madeleinelevy) saw fit to take my advice and to not run Time Machine concurrently with calibre.

As I see it the NTI Backup Now Continuous Backup feature has similar features to the Apple Time Machine product. So I'm suggesting you might want to consider disabling Backup Now when you're running calibre.

BR

[Inferno]

I am a firm believer that the time I spend on my calibre library is worth a bit of space for backups.

Cleaning up tags, ensuring the metadata shows what I want and the other information about the books is important enough to me that I keep a full backup of the library.

I normally do a rar of the entire library directory (with calibre closed of course) and name it by library name and date.

While many seem to think this is wasteful in terms of disk space, and that incremental backups work well, I am afraid I am of the school of thought that simple, full backups are easier to restore. Multiple backups, dated, will allow me to go back a few weeks or months to a point before an error occurred if necessary.

If your library is larger than a dvd (greater than 4 gig) then it may be necessary to save it to another drive or a usb drive or even a large sd card.

You can also save a copy of your library to the cloud.

I guess the main reason my backups are all in rar format is that I want to be sure I don't switch to my backup and start updating it and then switch back to the original.

[cvlowe]

External hard drives are very inexpensive nowadays. It would be a good idea to have 2 or more, and rotate them once in a while. i.e. bring one out of storage, erase it and copy the current one over to it, then store the current one. I have a fire safe I store my drives in to keep them safe while in storage. Since the EHD are mainly backups of what is already on my laptop this works out as a reasonably inexpensive and non-time consuming method for keeping my stuff safe.