Quote:
Originally Posted by Rellwood
Im wondering if there is any real benefit or difference between using Calibre portable on a computer vs. installing it.
I myself used the portable back when I wanted to run two instances of Calibre on my computer at the same time - I don't remember why but it was back in Windows 7.
I am reading where people have just put Calibre portable on their desktop and are using that as their main library and their way of "backing it up" is just by copying over the settings folders.
There has to be a reason why this isn't a good idea, but I can't off the top of my head figure out why.
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I primarily run Calibre Portable. Here are a few differences I've noticed
- Even though the main Calibre portable window has closed there is still a process running in the background doing DB stuff (I assume based on the fact that if that doesn't close on its own, I get DB not properly closed messages next time I run Calibre portable). This can take a long time. It might just be my USB drive, but I'm talking 10-15 min sometimes. The portable apps platform will refuse to shut down and eject the drive until this process closes. I usually open TaskManger, find the calibre process in the list and wait for it to disappear from the list to try and eject the drive.
- Again, it might be my USB drive, but I have a bit of lag for pretty much every operation I do. Importing books, importing duplicates is especially slow for some reason, deleting books (bad imports, etc), loading books in the internal viewer is also very slow, merging book records (I download books in as many officially produced formats as I can legally acquire without having to spend money on the book more than once to reduce the amount of format conversion I do)
- If you are using Calibre portable on a USB Drive or SD Card, you run the standard risks of data corruption if the drive is removed before the program has finished any disk writes and completely closed. I once opened the library on my USB under a natively installed Calibre on Linux and was greeted with a bunch of DB corruption errors. Once that was sorted out, Calibre portable fully closed faster than before (but still nowhere near the speed of closing the one under Linux)
- You have to wait for the portable apps repo to get the new version before you can update to the new version of Calibre, since, AFAIK, you can't use the built-in updater for the core program (you can still update plugins that way though) (And if you opened the calibre portable app before seeing there was an update you have to close it and wait for it to completely close before you can then do the update via the portable apps updater)