Quote:
Originally Posted by DoctorOhh
This is your problem. Unless you pause syncing, anytime you edit metadata you risk misplacing books. These books aren't actually deleted. When the metadata got updated a new folder was written with the correct title / author and since your book was locked (for some reason) it was never moved to the new location.
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It's worse than that, actually: Because Dropbox (and, I assume, many other file-syncing tools/services) are case insensitive in order to be Windows-friendly, even when the file
isn't locked a case change anywhere in the path (so for example in the
title or
author metadata fields) will cause a write conflict with the remote version, which Dropbox will resolve by creating an additional copy of the book/author folder (marked with
(Case Conflict) appended to the folder name).
The reason it is worse is that pausing the syncing doesn't prevent the problem!
The case conflict can be avoided if you do case-change renames (of either authors or titles) as follows:
- rename Mcname to McName_
- Wait for Dropbox to sync
- Rename McName_ to McName
This is essentially a high-latency two-phase commit, and a PITA.
This song-and-dance isn't necessary if you're changing anything other than (or in addition to) the case (eg. removing extra spaces, swapping title and author, removing or adding punctuation, correcting a misspelling, de-ASCII-fying, etc.).