Library not listing newly added books.

[Spinningwoman]

I’ve used Calibre for years - never done anything clever with it, just kept my library on Dropbox so that I can easily download books to my phone and e-readers when I want them. I’ve never really needed to understand how the library works. Now I’ve got the odd effect that I added books, which showed quite normally on the Calibre screen and were correctly written to folders on Dropbox in the normal way. But on next entering Calibre, they aren’t in the library. They are still there on Dropbox but Calibre doesn’t seem to know about them. Presumably the library list is wrong somehow? How do I fix it?? Thanks. Great program by the way - I wish I could add audiobooks to the listings too.

[DNSB]

Keep your library on your local drive and do a one way sync to Dropbox. calibre does not play nicely with network/NAS/cloud file systems and you will eventually end up with a corrupted library. See I am getting errors with my calibre library on a networked drive/NAS? in the calibre FAQs.

If you search on this forum, you will find quite a bit of advice on using Library maintenance to recover from some library corruption issues. I would suggest you copy your library back to your computer, add it as a library in calibre (Switch/create library, use the previously existing library at the new location) and then run Check library on it.

[Spinningwoman]

Thanks; I repaired my library and it all worked ok. I agree that I should probably move to keeping my library in the first instance on hard disk, backed up to Dropbox, but (a) I rather dread the time and work involved to switch as I manage calibre on a very slow, limited laptop and (b) I’m not clear how that would affect access to the Dropbox library via Calibre Sync. Wouldn’t that need a library db specifically pointing to Dropbox??

[theducks]

You simply MIRROR (one way) the library folder to the cloud with a program like Freefilesync WHEN CALIBRE IS NOT RUNNING. (avoids any file in use issues). You do NOT make Calibre changes direct to the cloud copy

FFS first scans the folder (that can take loner than the actual file update), then Transmits only the changed items.

[Spinningwoman]

Originally Posted by theducks

You simply MIRROR (one way) the library folder to the cloud with a program like Freefilesync WHEN CALIBRE IS NOT RUNNING. (avoids any file in use issues). You do NOT make Calibre changes direct to the cloud copy

FFS first scans the folder (that can take loner than the actual file update), then Transmits only the changed items.

Thanks for explain that, but it adds a big extra step. I’m pretty sure the only reason I got the problem was because I accidentally had calibre open and connected to the Dropbox library on two computers. That’s a very rare likelihood for me as I normally only ever use it on my laptop, so I think I’ll probably just take regular backups in case of problems and continue to keep it in the cloud.

[DNSB]

Good luck.