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Originally Posted by Leonatus
Sometimes it's a strange experience, how similar, despite of very different backgrounds, the structure of consideration can be. Overnight, I thought better, and, though not understanding every peculiarity of your advice, came to the same conclusion, even thinking of when I would have a little spare time to do this.
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Finding spare time is always a problem. But, if you can plan ahead to do it you won't be rushing into it when it falls over at exactly the wrong time. Of course, this is one of those "do as I say, not as I do" things
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Personally, I thought of doing simply a factory reset; as I have all my books - except those that I'm currently reading - on the nSD card, I would only have to repeat the setting of my preferences thereafter.
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A factory reset isn't a bad thing to do, especially if it is planned. I resets everything and rebuilds the database and everything.
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What do you mean saying: "power off and on again", after only having backuped the hard drive? Without changing anything, the device still works well, so there is no guessing about strange reactions. And do you mean with "start" the regular booting process of the device, in contrast to a new setup?
"Restore the saved files" is copying them back to the database, right?
Sorry, but I haven't done such things ever.
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When you power the Kobo devices off, they save the current state to files and the database. If the database is corrupt, it can't do the save properly. It might save some of the data, and not save some other. When it is turned on again, it reads the files and the database. Depending on how bad the database is, it might start OK. But, it won't be able to read the data from the database properly. And because it couldn't save it before, the data it can read will not be what you had before. This usually means the last few things you did are lost. So, the reading status of the last books being read will not have been updated.
If the database is in a really bad shape, then when the device is turned on, it won't be able to read the database. In that case, it will remove the database and start the setup processes. It will prompt for the WiFi password, the user details and check for a firmware update. As part of this, it will replace the database with a new empty one. Then it will start up and process any sideloaded books. After that, you will be able to use your device. It will have lost all the reading statuses for sideloaded books.
A factory reset goes beyond this. If formats the root and books partitions of the device. Then it installs the factory firmware and starts the setup process. This is the same as above, but there are no sideloaded books.
I occasionally do a factory reset to test something. The last one was three weeks ago when the light in my Glo stopped working. I was hoping it was a software problem and the factory reset would reinstall everything and fix it. Unfortunately it didn't. But, I was able to get back to where I was with the books.
What I did was:
- Connect the Glo to my PC without calibre.
- Copied the contents of the Glo to a directory on my PC. If you do this on a Mac, make sure you get the directories whose names start with a dot.
- Disconnected the Glo and did the factory reset.
- Did all the setup and tested if the light was working. It wasn't.
At this point there are two choice: Get back to exactly the state I was in, or just reload the books. I wanted to get back to the state I was in, so:
- Connect the Glo to the PC
- Deleted all the directories and files on the Glo
- Copied the files I copied off the Glo back onto it.
- Disconnected the Glo.
And I was back where I started.
If I had just wanted to reload the books, I would have connect the device to the PC and used calibre to send the books to it. In your case, you are plugging the SD card in and letting them get processed.