Thread: need help with hard drive cleanup
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Old 10-29-2013, 09:20 AM   #2
mbovenka
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Join Date: Oct 2007
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Quote:
Originally Posted by elemenoP View Post
- There are a lot of epub files in my Downloads folder, some with names I can read and some without. When I put books into Calibre, Calibre makes a copy so I can delete all the epub files in my Downloads folder, correct?

- I use Sony Reader Library to convert acsm files to epub. Then I bring the epub into Calibre. Again, since Calibre makes a copy of the epub, I could delete all the epubs in Documents / My Books / Reader Library, correct? How about the xml files in there? I guess those are needed for the Reader library database?

- I was also putting all my borrowed library books in Calibre, and then deleting them after reading. But I have discovered that I was only deleting the entry in Calibre, not the epub file.* So now I have a LOT of epub files on my hard drive, that I don't want. Can you think of any way to "look for" these? In other words, find epubs which are NOT in Calibre, in order to delete them? Or do I just have to look at all my epubs and remember which are library books?

*A suggestion to Calibre developers: when I delete a song in iTunes, it asks me if I want to delete the file as well. Same with Lightroom: when I delete a photo from the Lightroom database, it asks me if I want to delete the file. I think Calibre should work the same way.

Thanks for any help!
eP
Yes, Calibre keeps its own database, including the book files. If it's in there, you can delete all other copies of your books, wherever they are (assuming you keep your Calibre setup backup up, yadda yadda...)

And what your suggestion is concerned, it already does. When you delete a book from Calibre, it's gone, metadata and ebook file(s) (which is why it does warn you when you do it, unless you have disabled that warning).

So I don't really get how you could put books in Calibre (using the Calibre GUI, that is) and then 'only delete the entry in Calibre'; I don't think there is a way to do that, normally... You can run Library Maintenance to clean out all stuff that's in the Calibre library directory structure that's not in the database; that should take care of them.

But how you got there in the first place...I can only think of it being the other way round (database entries that refer to files on disk that don't exist) when you have been messing about in the library directory structure from outside Calibre itself (using the OS).
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