[chaley]

Originally Posted by hijack

After reading your comments about the 7.36 and my posts, I decided to do it right. First, I read the posting guidelines. Then I read all I could find about "Tweaks" in the manual. I'm impressed with all of Calbres abilities! I felt, and do feel, I can make the changes.

Good. Although with what you wrote below, my guess is that you are also frustrated.

I downloaded 7.35 to have as a backup if needed. Lastly, before starting on the tweaking with 7.36 I copied a back-up of the folders that had calibres catalog/lists or what ever on a separate drive. (remember, I'm new at Calibre.)

These are good steps.

That's when the disaster struck. (Mine, not yours)

When I went back to Calibre, all my lists were gone. I had no catalog.
My books were still on the PC, but not in Calibre.

OK, this is seriously strange. Nothing should have emptied your library.

Briefly explaining calibre's library might help. The library is a combined file store + database. All the metadata is stored in a file metadata.db, which is in the root folder of the library (the one with all the author names in it). All the book formats, covers, and other like information is stored in the subfolders. Another folder, completely separate from your library, contains your preferences.

I assume that you mean 'catalog' as calibre's book display (it has other meanings in calibre). For the display to empty, one of three things must have happened.
1) The library folder's name was changed.
2) The metadata.db file was removed.
3) The preferences indicating where the library is stored were changed.

From here, I can't tell you which one (or ones) happened to you. My suspicion is that when you were doing your backup, you might have accidentally changed the name of the library. Alternatively, you accidentally moved metadata.db instead of copying it. One technique that has bitten me is to do a backup by renaming a folder, then copying the contents back to the original. It is easy to make mistakes during the copy-back.

If you are using Linux, you would also need to be careful about letter case. In linux, the files 'somebook' and 'Somebook' are different files and you can have them both. In windows and (I think) macos, you can't.

I tried to find a way to recover and reclaim the existing list. Not having studied that subject yet, lets just say, I failed.

My main problem seemed to be it kept trying to go to the hard drive I put the back-up files on when I would try to recreate the catalog.

This sounds like the preferences got changed.

My Questions?

Could I have saved my Library with a simple procedure?

Making a copy of the library folder is the best way to do a backup of the library. Note that I say a copy of the folder, not a copy of the content of the folder. It is too easy not to select everything in the library (such as metadata.db) when making a copy of the content.

Note that you should also make a backup of calibre's preferences folder (again, the folder, not the content).

Any guesses on why it kept wanting to go to the back-up drives?

Somehow in your experiments you aimed calibre at your backup? That could happen if you used 'change library' or played with the --with-library option.

I did go back to 7.35 after all this happened. I see that 7.37 is now out. After following that awhile on the forums, I'll update.

One suggestion: do one thing at a time. Play first with backing up your library, to be sure you can back it up. Also play with recovering it. Backups you can't use to recover are worse than useless.

Next, play with the configuration options using the release you have. Particularly related to this discussion are the change library commands that let you switch between copies of a library.

Last, when you upgrade, don't change anything else until you have satisfied yourself that the upgrade works.

Good luck!