Save to disk error, tagging...

[myle00]

Hi,
First, thanks for calibre, I have been using it now for a month and it's really great!

I have about 150 gb of books on my computer and I have been working to organize them in calibre. Most of the books titles are massed up so they are not a good source for the metadata. However, using Abbyy fine reader and pdftk I converted the files to text and in java I ran through the files and extracted their ISBN and from that got the metadata - in case someone else wants to do this.

The second part, where I need some advice is backing up the files. I don't have enough room on my computer so I have to move the files to DVDs. However there doesn't seem to be a easy way to do this. The main problem is selecting the right files from the library, move and delete them and than knowing on which DVD they are.

What I'm doing now - and I'm wondering if someone has an easier way, is to in java save the metadata through the show_metadata command, than add a tag with the name of the DVD it will be on and than import it back with the set_metadata command. Than I save it and delete the original files in java. So far it's working well except when I do the Save To Disk I get some errors every one in a while. here is the error I get.

[Error 3] The system cannot find the path specified: u'C:/Books\\G, Ronald & Dunkley & Curran & Joseph), Donald J. (Donald & 1943- & Reid & E., Neal & 1938- & Crippin & Peter & Reid, Neal E. & MacKay & Jock\\Harcourt Mathematics 12 _ Geometry and Discrete Mathematics. Solutions Manual _ Editors, Ronald Dunkley, Don Curran ; Authors, Peter Crippin, Jock MacKay, Neal Reid'
Detailed traceback:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "main.py", line 980, in save_to_disk
  File "calibre\gui2\library.pyo", line 214, in save_to_disk
  File "calibre\library\database2.pyo", line 1436, in export_to_dir
WindowsError: [Error 3] The system cannot find the path specified: u'C:/Books\\G, Ronald & Dunkley & Curran & Joseph), Donald J. (Donald & 1943- & Reid & E., Neal & 1938- & Crippin & Peter & Reid, Neal E. & MacKay & Jock\\Harcourt Mathematics 12 _ Geometry and Discrete Mathematics. Solutions Manual _ Editors, Ronald Dunkley, Don Curran ; Authors, Peter Crippin, Jock MacKay, Neal Reid'

To fix it I have to make the title or the Authors list shorter. But it's hard since I don't know on which file it'll get stuck.

My basic question is about the error, if there is an easier way to do all this and finally - I know that even if the file is deleted from the folder I can still change the metadata with no trouble, but I'm worried that it may not work so in a future version and my files won't be in the major dir folder.

b.t.w. I'm still on .5.14 version
Thanks for any help,

M

[user_none]

It sounds like you are running into a path length limitation of Windows or the file system. I'm not 100% sure but I believe the limit is 255 characters.

[kovidgoyal]

Yeah it probably is the path length. You'd be better off putting all that author information into the comments

[myle00]

Thanks.
Since I don't manually add the title and author, I would have to go through all the files and change those that seem to big. Would it be possible, when creating the folders, to automatically cut off the title and author so that it doesn't exceed the path length, without having to do this to the data. Or would this make it platform dependent? Because it's hard to know which file will be too long - and I tried doing it by editing any that has column length >, but it's hard. It typically takes at least 10 saves to correct all the files.

Thanks,
M