Quote:
Originally Posted by Adoby
The library has to be in one place on a local filesystem, but there is nothing to stop you from sending the books to different locations in the the network, including the NAS, using save to disk, or even to access the whole library from any place in the network using the built in calibre OPDS server.
And you can use calibre on your local network in other ways:
You could share the desktop of the "master librarian" computer that run calibre, on the network, using some form of remote desktop software. I usually use VNC.
You could also automatically replicate copies of the calibre library to other computers, perhaps using some sync software. This is also a good idea for backup purposes. Make sure not to sync while calibre is running. One way is to add the sync commands to the script that start calibre. That way you can sync a central copy of the library on the NAS every time you run calibre. For instance just before and/or after calibre is run. Since only changes has to be synced, this is usually very fast.
I actually have my calibre library on a Synology NAS without any problems. But I don't use Windows. Instead I use Ubuntu Linux and share the library on the NAS using NFS. This has worked fine for several years. But I only use the library on one computer. And I have automatic backups in several generations. And I tested carefully to make sure there was no problems. I actually have the metadata.db on a local SSD-drive for performance reasons. Calibre worked fine when metadata.db was on the NAS as well, but it was slower.
There are two problems with having the library on a network drive. Some network filesystem has limitations that calibre is not built to handle. I have seen this to be true for Linux NAS, like Synology, that are accessed from Windows using the SMB or CIFS network filesystem. There may be other situations as well. The other problem is that the library is strictly single user. If more than one instance of calibre, or any other program, tries to access the library at the same time, this may result in errors and even data loss.
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I have a big Calibre library on a Win7 PC. now I am switching to Ubuntu. what should I do? I have read the Kovid does NOT recommend sharing the library between 2 different OS. I have to convert the library or simply copy to the Ubuntu disk?