[deliquate]

TLDR: I created a bespoke metadata field for all of my reviews, and at some point (I didn't use Calibre for several years) an update seems to have erased them all. Is there any way to recover my reviews?

I was a regular calibre user for a while, and also used to regularly post book reviews to amazon. At some point--years ago--I decided I wasn't going to give Amazon all that free content anymore, so I made a special metadata category in Calibre, imported all my reviews to it, and then deleted them from Amazon. They're not available anywhere else, and it's years of all my thoughts about books. I'm gutted at the thought of losing them.

Recently when I opened up Calibre and thought I'd get myself back up to speed, a LOT of the things I'd imported when I was last a regular user were missing. The thing that's hardest for me to grapple with are the reviews--those would be unrecoverable.

But it's probably also worth mentioning that I was using Calibre to catalogue all the books that I legitimately purchase from online retailers (I believe in buying content and I also believe that I'm buying a book and not a license), so I was stripping DRM from all those books when cataloguing them. As far as I can tell, most of those books are gone too. That's fine--I can re-download them--but it's a huge project and my trust in Calibre is pretty broken at the moment.

What happened to my reviews? Is there any chance of recovering them? Where would I look? I bought a new laptop and I'm kind of terrified that my old laptop has all my content.