I appreciate your kind help I couldn't have solved it just by myself. Thank you again chaley,
I'm happy to hear that the ones I mentioned woudl not have caused the problem
Thank you also for the cautionary tips I definitely need them.
Your cloud copy is also another ideal and further step although I am hesitant to do it because of the costs involved for my close to 50gb and growing library,
at the same time I could argue with myself that the loss time I have had recently was much more costly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chaley
There is nothing obvious in that process that would have caused the problems.
The usual way that problems like yours arise is having calibre on a network drive. They can also happen if the file system on a local drive isn't "native". Backup-like programs can also cause problems, in particular cloud backups, because they can undo calibre's renames. You should look at your system to verify that the file systems on the disks are normal for your operating system, and also look at what programs you have running in the background.
There are two questions here: 1) how to add books to calibre, and 2) how to backup your calibre library.
As for 1), add the books in any of the ways supported by calibre. None of them are more dangerous than the others. And eschwartz's comments about one book per folder are spot on.
Regarding 2) again eschwartz is right. If what you want is a backup then use software that makes backups. There are many available. As it is a backup you probably want to use a "mirror deletes" copy mode so that the backup is an accurate copy of the library, not the union of changes over time with folders left behind.
I go a step further and use a backup program (Acronis) that supports incremental updates and history browsing so that I can restore something from (say) a week ago, but these programs typically cost money and can be 'interesting' to set up. I also am backing up much more than my library, storing the backups on my local multi-terabyte Synology NAS. Out of paranoia I also backup (almost) everything to a cloud backup service (Livedrive) so that I will have something available if disaster strikes at my apartment, destroying all equipment and copies. And finally, a few important things are also kept on Dropbox. And yes, over the years I have had to recover information from all three of these backup locations, once because the NAS-of-the-moment failed just when I needed it and once because I had misconfigured the cloud backup. Bottom line: think carefully about what you are trying to achieve with a backup strategy, set it up, then test it.
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