[DNSB]

Personally, between using Kobo Utilities to save my reading status and it's ability to restore metadata including using the data added to calibre to set the date added to your Kobo, I don't find it that much of an effort. OTOH, I once used collections in calibre but eventually decided that that they were not that useful so I ended up removing all of the removable collections other than Finished. Most of the collections were genre and series, I found genre almost useless when I had over 1900 in SFF and series died when Kobo started supporting series natively. I also use KoboUtilities backup which backs up the two main databases, version, affiliate.conf, Kobo eReader.conf and the .adobe-digital-editions directory automatically on my first connect of a day.

Yes, it took some time to set this up but given that I was running into more factory resets than the average user, it was worth while.