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Old 04-26-2010, 03:18 PM   #1
modkindle
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calibre and dropbox error

I use calibre and dropbox together and made a big mistake and although I still have all of my books, my calibre can't find them. I tried to add another computer to the dropbox and calibre and have both computers have access to the same library. It seems to have written two metadata.db files and messed everything up. Is there any way for me to replace the metadata.db file with the correct one so I don't have to add all 607 books again and edit the metadate for them?

Thank you so much. I hope my question makes sense, as I am not very technical.
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Old 04-26-2010, 03:43 PM   #2
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Quote:
Originally Posted by modkindle View Post
I use calibre and dropbox together and made a big mistake and although I still have all of my books, my calibre can't find them. I tried to add another computer to the dropbox and calibre and have both computers have access to the same library. It seems to have written two metadata.db files and messed everything up. Is there any way for me to replace the metadata.db file with the correct one so I don't have to add all 607 books again and edit the metadate for them?

Thank you so much. I hope my question makes sense, as I am not very technical.
Someone here will help you. Just don't delete any copies of your metadata.db or overwrite any. If your books are still in your library (and they almost certainly are), all you will have to do is put the correct metadata.db back into the library. That will get you most of your books back (any added after the problem occurred probably will need to be added again.) There are several dropbox experts here, and you should be able to recover conflict files.
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Old 04-26-2010, 03:46 PM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Starson17 View Post
Someone here will help you. Just don't delete any copies of your metadata.db or overwrite any. If your books are still in your library (and they almost certainly are), all you will have to do is put the correct metadata.db back into the library. That will get you most of your books back (any added after the problem occurred probably will need to be added again.) There are several dropbox experts here, and you should be able to recover conflict files.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I still have all of the books and I know which metadata.db I need and I still have it. But in my efforts to "fix" this I tried to unhook the dropbox folder (in Calibre preferences) and rehook it and it then hates the whole metadata.db file that I have.
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Old 04-26-2010, 04:51 PM   #4
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Originally Posted by modkindle View Post
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I still have all of the books and I know which metadata.db I need and I still have it. But in my efforts to "fix" this I tried to unhook the dropbox folder (in Calibre preferences) and rehook it and it then hates the whole metadata.db file that I have.
There are procedures in dropbox to get back files when they're in a conflict state. I'm sorry I don't know them, but others do. If you can find the correct metadata.db, all you have to do is put it in the right place (be careful when you do this, as you will have to overwrite what's there now -save all your files). Once the right metadata.db is in your library, you should make sure that Calibre is pointed to that library location (Check Preferences.)

If Calibre is complaining about your metadata.db, however, your metadata.db may be corrupted.

After you get your best metadata.db in the right place, and get Calibre pointed to it, you should probably run the database integrity option in Preferences.

You may want to search for the dropbox threads here. They should give you some idea of how to recover.
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Old 04-26-2010, 05:14 PM   #5
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Because of the order of things you did, you now (probably) have what dropbox calls conflicts. These happen when the same file changes in two places. In your case, the metadata.db changed on the new machine before it was successfully synced from the original machine. This happens if you run calibre on the new machine before sync finishes.

The way out of this is probably:
1. Ensure that each machine is connected to dropbox.
2. Go to your dropbox website. Navigate through your folders (on the website) to calibre's library folder, the one containing metadata.db.
3. Run your mouse over the metadata.db file. Click the little down-pointing triangle that appears, and select 'previous versions'
4. Select the version that is correct. It will be the newest largest version. You might also be able to tell from the timestamp, taking the one dated from before you added the new dropbox client.
5. Restore that version.
6. At this point, you have told dropbox which one is correct. This file will be downloaded to all the clients. However, on machines with the *wrong* db, the correct db will show up as a conflict file. Delete the wrong one and rename the right one to metadata.db.

An alternate way that avoids step 6 is to delete metadata.db* from every machine in step 1. If you do this, then step 3 must be modified to include clicking the 'show deleted files' button so that you will see the versions of metadata.db to select from.

Do not run calibre until all machines claim to be fully synced.

Good luck!
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Old 04-26-2010, 05:19 PM   #6
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thank you Chaley. I will try that tonight. The worst thing that happens is I go back a couple of weeks with my library and only add a few books. Could be a lot worse. I guess I got a bit too big for my britches with experimentation!
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Old 04-26-2010, 10:57 PM   #7
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Success. Thank you so very much
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