Hi,
just felt the need to post my personal experience with restoring a crashed library because YES, that happened to me a few days ago! And maybe my experience is old news to most of you but for me it was new territory.
So, this is my story:
I worked a whole weekend on optimizing my fanfiction library - optimizing my settings, optimizing my custom columns, optimizing my templates, optimizing my catalog functions - just optimizing in general all that needed (in my opinion) to be optimized. And believe me when I say I found a lot!
Further I experimented with dropbox AND cleared my whole reader and played my whole fanfiction library back on.
The only thing missing was making a backup.
But as I wanted to do that Sunday evening... opened calibre
SHOCK
no stories in it! ALL 1.870 totally optimized stories GONE!!! ALL my settings, custom columns GONE!!!! My whole calibre library set back to the default settings with NOTHING in it!
I don't really know what happened but it did happen (though personally I blame dropbox for it)!
After my first heart-attack was over, my journey to get it back was on. And before you ask
- no, pointing calibre again to the location of the library didn't work
- no, dropbox was not syncing (and I only put a copy of my library up there anyway)
- yes, I had a backup but it was a month old AND before all my optimization
- and yes, the book folders (with the book files) were still in the library folder (though I found out later that 16 books were missing at that time)
So I learned a few things that are good to know... next time... should it ever happen again...
- to have a backup in a newest version is always good
- to have your complete library in a newest version on your reader is very good (if you don't have the first thing)
- to have a document file with all settings, custom columns, templates of your calibre is priceless (if you don't have the first two things)
You want to know why?
- When you try 'Library Maintenance → Restore database' you have to rebuilt ALL you custom columns and templates first, otherwise you will only get the default installed columns filled (because calibre can't write any data in columns that don't exist even when the data for them is stored in the books metadata).
A point that wasn't made really clear for me in the calibre manual.
- Copy the metadata and metadata_prefs files from your library folder AFTER rebuilding all your settings and custom columns BEFORE starting the restore because then you don't have to make them every time new when it doesn't work the way you want it (made this mistake two times until I found that out
).
- And a problem that I had too, though I don't know if it really was a mistake on my part or the other way around. I tried three times but the restore function always skipped one or two custom columns. They were gone after the restore (and I don't think I made the same mistakes in my templates and naming of the columns three times). The fourth time I put the custom columns more or less in the same order than they were before my crash and then it worked.
As I connected my reader to the new restored library, I found out though that 16 books were missing!
And then I found out that I can also import my books from my reader to my library (though I don't know if every reader stores all the metadata information the same way than Sony reader do)! So I added the books to the library from my reader and SAVED that now complete-again library.
Then I tried the restore again, though this time NOT over the restore function from calibre. This time I tried it directly over my reader (because as I said before I had my complete and newest version of my library on it anyway). So I opened an empty library (with all my custom columns and settings) and imported the whole library directly from my reader. Worked also perfectly!
So, you see? Having a backup of ALL your settings and custom columns (and templates in them) is a very good thing, additional to an up to date library backup or an up to date reader backup.
Of course the first thing I did after I had everything back, was making a backup of everything. Just in case...
So, that was my personal experience with a crashed library, what was yours?
Mini