[Gary Young]

Since I bought a new reader, I have been using Calibre to convert all of my ebooks to ePub.

As part of this process, I have corrected or entered the metadata for author and author_sort using semicolons to separate the names of co-authors, for example: {Drake ; Flint} , {Evans ; Weber} (I leave off the first names of the authors, because it doesn't come out correctly on my reader. Or at least, I can't get the reader itself to sort and display the books the way I want.)

Today, I decided to back up the many hours of work that have gone into this project so far. So I saved my entire Calibre library to a temporary directory on my hard disk. Then I tried to burn the exported files to DVD.

This failed, because the joliette naming convention prohibits the use of semicolons in file names in data CDs/DVDs (Or at least that's what Roxio Creator told me.)

To get around this, I found and downloaded a utility program from the interrnet (Advanced Renamer (highly recommended by me)) and did a bulk search and replace on the filenames in my temporary location. That is, I changed all ";" to "[SC]".

This "worked" but I could do without the hassle.

I can't really see a better solution for this since the ePub standard seems to want me to use semicolons to separate authors names, and the joliette standard wants me to not use semicolons at all.

I could, of course back up to another hard disk, but I wanted DVDs, because they are cheap.

I could adjust the file naming template in "preferences" to leave off the author and the author_sort fields, but that 'cure' is worse than the problem.

Have other people had this problem? Is there a better solution than the one I found?

Is this even the right way to make a backup? Should I be using "calibre-portable.bat" to put the library onto a USB stick?

Thanks
Gary