[Glaurung-quena]

ETA: look at the bottom of this post for my solution.

I have about 500 epubs (and more every week) loaded on Stanza on my Ipad 2. (using the latest version on IOS 5.0.1)

However, when I go into Itunes to attempt to back up my library by using the "file sharing" panel on Itunes to save them to my computer, Itunes can only see about 220 epubs loaded into stanza.

a) Is there something wrong, or is this just more evidence that Itunes is crap?

b) Is there any way to backup ALL the books I have loaded into stanza without using Itunes?

I made a backup of the data on the Ipad using Itunes but there doesn't seem to be a way to extract the data from the backup - I saw a reference to a program put out by the Stanza software developers to extract your books from an Itunes backup, but could not find a live link to it.

Thanks in advance!

===

Edit: I found a solution.

Lexcycle's stanza backup java app, which has become difficult to find, did not work for me (the best place to get it appears to be the internet archive's wayback machine).

Here's how I got my books out:
1. I installed a program that lets me bypass Itunes and look at the files loaded on the Ipad directly. Macroplant.com has several, including some that are free.
2. I found the stanza app folder in User\applications. App folders have cryptic and random names, but usually there's a file or folder inside them that is clearly named so you know what it is - the Stanza folder has a subfolder called Stanza, so that was easy.
3. Inside the stanza app folder, I copied the contents of the Documents folder, and its hidden .Stanza subfolder, to my computer.
4. The Documents folder contained a few .epub files, but not anywhere near all of them. The hidden .Stanza subfolder contained 10 numbered subfolders, which contained a lot of files with just numbers for names and no extension. My google searching told me that these files were my books, renamed this way for my inconvenience.
5. I did a search on the copy of the documents folder, for files named *.* (ie, all files), then sorted the search results by file type - this let me easily select out all the files without extensions and copy them to a new folder. There were exactly as many of these as I had books loaded into the Ipad, so I knew I was on the right track.
6. I mass renamed all the number-no extension files to .epub, and drag-dropped them into Calibre. Calibre kindly creates copies of everything with sensible file names in its library.

Fortunately I only had epubs loaded into Stanza. If I'd had a mix of file types, I guess I would have repeated step 6 for each possible file type until I got Calibre to recognize and load all the books.