invalid or incorrect file format

anagel · 10-20-2014, 02:03 PM

my friend has calibre on her mac and she performed an upgrade (to 2.6.0) - then later the next day she tried to send books to her kobo but she is getting this error:

"could not upload the following books to the device, as no suitable formats
were found. Convert the book(s) to a format supported by your device first".

I had her try to convert one of the books in question but it failed. And she has lost the covers on most of her books as well. She tried to do a library maintenance...database recovery/restore but it didn't work. What else could she do? besides delete her books and re-add them ??

eschwartz · 10-21-2014, 08:54 PM

calibre does not touch the library folder when it gets upgraded. The problem is almost certainly unrelated.

Is your friend by any chance running any file-syncing programs on her library folder?
Dropbox, Google Drive, SugarSync, Copy.com, Time Machine all qualify.
If so, she should never run any such service while calibre is running. The two will disagree on what goes where and you will end up with files/folders getting reverted, deleted, moved or assumed moved, etc.

When you edit title or author data in calibre, all affected books are moved (on the filesystem level) to reflect the new names, which is when the disagreement starts.

You can repair the damage by looking at wherever the backups are kept, for Time Machine, or by having the Dropbox/whatever team rolling back your cloud to a previous time. (You will lose all changes since that time.)

She can confirm this as the problem by running Check Library instead of Restore database. I suspect she will see a long list of missing files, and possibly some extra ones too.

10-20-2014, 02:03 PM	#1
anagel Member Posts: 18 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada Device: Kindle Paperwhite	invalid or incorrect file format my friend has calibre on her mac and she performed an upgrade (to 2.6.0) - then later the next day she tried to send books to her kobo but she is getting this error: "could not upload the following books to the device, as no suitable formats were found. Convert the book(s) to a format supported by your device first". I had her try to convert one of the books in question but it failed. And she has lost the covers on most of her books as well. She tried to do a library maintenance...database recovery/restore but it didn't work. What else could she do? besides delete her books and re-add them ?? Last edited by anagel; 10-20-2014 at 03:30 PM. Reason: more specific information

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10-21-2014, 08:54 PM	#2
eschwartz Ex-Helpdesk Junkie Posts: 19,421 Karma: 85400180 Join Date: Nov 2012 Location: The Beaten Path, USA, Roundworld, This Side of Infinity Device: Kindle Touch fw5.3.7 (Wifi only)	calibre does not touch the library folder when it gets upgraded. The problem is almost certainly unrelated. Is your friend by any chance running any file-syncing programs on her library folder? Dropbox, Google Drive, SugarSync, Copy.com, Time Machine all qualify. If so, she should never run any such service while calibre is running. The two will disagree on what goes where and you will end up with files/folders getting reverted, deleted, moved or assumed moved, etc. When you edit title or author data in calibre, all affected books are moved (on the filesystem level) to reflect the new names, which is when the disagreement starts. You can repair the damage by looking at wherever the backups are kept, for Time Machine, or by having the Dropbox/whatever team rolling back your cloud to a previous time. (You will lose all changes since that time.) She can confirm this as the problem by running Check Library instead of Restore database. I suspect she will see a long list of missing files, and possibly some extra ones too.

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