Quote:
Originally Posted by dwanthny
It isn't a backup until you restore it and it works.  |
True, true
Quote:
Originally Posted by dwanthny
It is only 161 books. Calibre is your backup. Just use Calibre to delete the books from the Sony. Now select the 161 books in Calibre and send them to the device. It only takes a couple of minutes and all your collections will be back just like before. |
Thanks for your reply dwanthny but, well, maybe I'm not using Calibre the "right" way.
What I do is manually copy the files to the reader, then use Calibre only as an editor in order to tag them with the correct author/title info. Calibre has no means to restore the reader.
The interesting thing is, I finally solved this riddle
It has to do with the _creation_ timestamp of files: if the timestamp of a file differs from the one recorded in the xml, the reader treats the file as modified and re-reads the tag info.
Obviously, my backup system maintained the original _modification_ timestamps but modified the file _creation_ timestamps, triggering the reread of every bit of information (also from MP3 and JPG files - lots of them on my device).
I was able to sort the mess out using a free tool called Moo0 TimeStamp, after having to deal with another nasty issue related to daylight savings time - every summer timestamp off by one hour.
And for the future? I have a feeling that even using Calibre the right way, the timestamps would get fully renewed in case of a restore, losing the very useful ability to search the books by date. I'm considering using Ghost to snapshot the contents of the reader - Only have to check if the operation preserves the creation timestamps.
-- Carlo aka Bitman