[Beanxx]

Dear Folks--
For a long time I have been maintaining my Calibre library across several machines using Dropbox. Recently I have become increasingly aware that the file structure in Dropbox does not correspond well to the files shown in the Calibre library view. So I made a backup, and then ran a restore database.

The result of the restore were pretty frightening. It looked very different from the library as previously shown. More than a thousand books disappeared. From checking a sample, it look like there are media files for most of these in the backed-up database. In addition, more than a thousand titles which were not previously visible appeared. So the restored library is very different than the saved library.

I've been reading forum posts and the Manual and I am pretty sure I know what I did wrong. I was unaware that when using Dropbox you can not run Calibre on more than one machine at a time. I am sure I have done this as often as not over a long period of time.

I'm not going to make that mistake any more, and I'll poke about to see if there is a better way to maintain multiple synced local copies. But I am looking for advice and instruction on what the heck I do now. Should I try to merge the backed-up and restored libraries? Should I delete on of the DB files and import the folder structure? Or what?

I really do not want to throw away hundreds or thousands of books and the hundreds of hours I have spent fixing the metadata for them.

Sympathetic advice gratefully welcomed.

Sincerely, Andrew