Quote:
Originally Posted by droopy
Not sure if you had the chance to read the entire thread for context....SirTel's advice involves more than one library. For that reason, I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean by "the entire library". Which library? Both the old and new libraries?
|
You can choose the libraries you want to export.
Quote:
|
Well, the plan is to do a partial backup. (If you could kindly read the rest of thread, it may help you understand what I mean.) So, though I may not need the configuration data backed up in the secondary library (the library that's gonna be backed up to the cloud), I do wish to back up the config data with the library that will remain on my laptop.
|
I'm aware. You'll note the steps I posted are for partial backups. I meant to type "You can still split
zip files anyway" in case you prefer to upload smaller 1GB chunks for backup or something.
Quote:
I noted that step g ("delete only the formats for the books, but kee the metadata entries") is rather different from SirTel's advice.
If I'm understanding you correctly, the advantage behind your plan is that I get to trim my Calibre library's size on my laptop while still knowing what books are in my entire collection. Is this correct? If so, I like this idea.
My worry/concern though with this idea is that, later on (whenever I'll reunite with my desktop computer with a larger storage capacity), it will be tedious to "merge" the "formats for the backed up books" back with the " format-less" "metadata entries". Correct me if I'm wrong.... merging the "formats" (the book files) with their corresponding metadata entries means opening each metadata entry up and drag and dropping the PDF or EPUB or CBZ or AZW into the upper-right "format" box. When I imagine having to do this for 6,000 titles, I have to say, "Sorry, but that's a whole lot of time".  Am I misunderstanding the workflow for merging?
|
Yes, being able to know and search for offloaded books is the advantage with this method.
Iirc, there's an option in Calibre to merge similar/identical entries when copying books between libraries. No need to handle this manually.
Alternately, you could always filter the empty entries in the original by the backup tag, delete them, and then do the copy from the backup library.