Quote:
Originally Posted by dwanthny
I'm a big fan of using the save to disk feature to back up your books
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I'm not a big fan of that method. The main reason is probably that I don't have a device that Calibre considers to be an ereader, so I can't use Send to Device. I have to use Save to Disk.
Using Save to Disk as a backup method has 4 big drawbacks:
1) You have to leave the option "Save Cover Separately" turned on. This option is hidden in Preferences on the 2nd tab of the fifth option down. Otherwise your covers don't get backed up.
2) You have to leave the option "Save Metadata in OPF File" turned on. This option is also hidden in Preferences on the 2nd tab of the fifth option down. Otherwise your metadata doesn't get backed up.
3) Your recipes aren't backed up.
4) It's hard to automate a backup.
Problems 1 and 2 can be solved by never turning off those options. However, when you have to constantly use Save to Disk to send to your ereader, as I do, those options are a pain. I could live with the fact that they take up space on my SD card, but the OPF file also produces a file that's the same as the ebook except for extension. My browser on the ereader doesn't show the whole filename, making it hard to pick the ebook instead of the opf file.
Problem 3 can be solved by backing up recipes separately, but that's several steps and harder. Problem 4 isn't really solvable AFAICT.
It really is much simpler to just copy the entire Library directory. Plus you can do incremental backups, if you wish, using a synchronization program. It will find your new ebook folders, copy those, and detect the fact that the metadata.db file has changed and copy it. It's all automated for me, and I can leave the two "Save" options off and not worry about recipes.
Of course, whatever works is fine, but you just have to be more careful.