I'm starting to contemplate breaking out my Calibre Library into more than one volume.
There are several reasons for this. One is the size of the library.
I have the master library on the HD, and a backup on a USB thumb drive. After I've added books and updated the metadata, I use an open source program called
Free File Sync to mirror the changes on the HD copy to the thumb drive. I've already had to migrate to a larger thumb drive, and at some point may need to do so again.
Another, related to the first, is content. My normal eBook viewer is a 7" Android tablet, viewed using the open source
FBReader for Android. By preference, I get ePub, but sometimes there isn't an ePub version. Some things I only see in Mobi format (which
can be converted to ePub, but since FBReader handles ePub and Mobi, I usually don't bother.)
More often, the content is only available as PDF, and some of those are
huge (like stuff from Archive.org, where 100MB or larger file size is not uncommon.) In general, I don't even
try to read PDFs on the tablet. FBReader has a PDF viewer plugin that works well in that it will display the PDFs, but the 7" screen makes trying to read them painful, and the big ones take an approximation of forever to open.
So I'm looking at splitting out the Calibre Library by content type, with ePub and Mobi in one library instance, and PDF and other things in a second. The ePub/Mobi library is that one that would contain things to be added to the tablet. There would be a second backup USB thumb drive for the PDFs and the like. (I'm aware of and am experimenting with Virtual Libraries. That's handy for selecting titles to potentially add the the tablet, but doesn't address the physical size of the library problem.)
One issue I don't see a way to address is being able to get a top level overview that shows all volumes in
both libraries. I can live without it if I must, but it would be nice to have a list of
everything I could search to see what I have.
Another is the best way to use Calibre to do the split.
Is anyone else using Calibre to manage multiple physical libraries? What sort of strategy do you use to do so?
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Dennis