[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

theducks, on shirt pocket drives.

@David - theducks post reminded of something

I know of a calibre user who has zillions of fan fiction stories and a boatload of custom columns who keeps a 'backup' copy of their calibre library on a portable drive. When they travel they attach the portable drive to their Samsung Tab, and then they access the library via CC's Cloud feature.
As I understand it, CC's Cloud interface uses the calibre library/database directly, its read only of course.

And this maybe the clincher for you, I'm fairly certain they maintain the backup copy with FFS over USB cable!

Not going there on the portable drive. For my purposes, a USB stick is fine. If it gets lost or damaged, it's dirt cheap to replace , and performance is more than adequate. I have no current needs that would require higher capacity than USB sticks currently offer.

(Mind you, I can use a portable drive directly with my tablet. I have a USB portable backup drive. I can plug it into a USB hub, and attach the hub via an OTG Adapter to the tablet microUSB port. The tablet is rooted, and I have a driver installed that can mount the portable drive and access the NTFS file system on the drive. I need to use a powered hub because the tablet can't power the drive via USB. It lacks the power to do so. If I plug the drive in without a powered hub, the tablet will see it, but it will go away again.)

You may need this plugin ==>> Save Composite Custom Columns

I just went through an Install Plugins exercise, and I think that's one I installed.

I use Chrome for calibre-server because it's not Firefox, which is also my main browser, I'm thinking of switching to Edge or firewalled Midori for calibre-server access.

Edge? <gack>

I have Midori here, but you might want to look at Qupzilla. It's an open source browser based on Webkit and Qt, and available for a lot of things, including Windows, Linux, OS/X and OS/2.

I've never needed (or even wanted) a single top level list. I create CSV's via the Catalogue feature, or via the calibredb --list command. If I selected just common columns I guess I could concatenate the output of multiple calibredb commands into a single file.

I'm assuming I won't have the same volumes in multiple libraries. So a top level list is a way to see whether I have something at all without having to open each library to look. I can do that by exporting and combining CSV files, and importing the result into a spreadsheet.

I use nirsoft's CSVFileView to view the CSV files (IMO spreadsheets are overkill), it has an export to HTML feature which is useful for sharing with others.

I have an assortment of Nirsoft utilities. I may have that one. Whether a spreadsheet is overkill depends on what you need to do.

When I travelled a lot I preferred shirt pocket drives to thumb drives, they were bigger capacity wise and for me at least less easily lost. As a consequence of always losing them I tend to buy cheap thumb drives which fade like newsprint left in the sun

As mentioned, capacity isn't a prime selector in what I use. I tend not to lose stuff like this. But if I do, it's dirt cheap to replace, especially since it won't be the only copy of the data stored on it.

I have a few 20+ year old SCSI drives that are still readable.

I think I may have one. I no longer have a machine that takes SCSI drives, however.

There's a search tool called Recoll that runs on Windows and Linux, and there's a Recoll plugin for calibre - not sure what its status is, a peek suggests 'uncertain'. I think Docfetcher also runs on Linux and Windows.

I think I've heard of Recoil, but haven't poked at it. And I believe Docfetcher does indeed run under Windows and Linux.

For some document types (but not ebook formats - except PDF) X1 shows results with search terms highlighted, which is the main reason I have it. I keep a searchable copy of everything, most of my 'books' originate as PDF, DOC(X), or ODT documents, but if I 'only' have something else (ePUB or Mobi etc) I convert to TXT or DOCX. Maybe one day someone will write an IFilter for ePUB at least.

I've contemplated doing things like opening the Mobi and ePub files and extracting the HTML to someplace else so that it can be conveniently searched. But it looks like a lot more trouble than it would be worth for my purposes.
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Dennis