Total ignoramus messes up her Calibre

[StellaTP]

Hello good and knowledgeable people!

(I apologize if this is a wrong place to post (please point me to the correct one) and I know it's too long, but desperate times and all that )


I am totally stupid when it comes to computers and 99.9% of what you talk about on this forum is Klingon to me, so please please please be patient and please help, if you can (but use small words so I can understand I know just enough to mess things up, which is the worst kind of idiot, I know )


Here is what I happened to me.

I had my Calibre all set up on my laptop, with over 9,000 books. It worked really well for me. I thought I had my main library on my laptop's hard disk, and two backups (one on an external HD, the other on an NAS) but I didn't know to export the library through Calibre, so I just copied the library folder from time to time.

My laptop suddenly died, with no warning whatsoever, a week or so after I copied my library to my two backups (I think; couldn't have been more than 10 days). I though - no problem, I will just install Calibre on my new laptop and use one of the backups.

When I did that, my library suddenly had only 8,000 books. So I thought I would try to make another library with the other backup, but that didn't work, still not all the books were there and I didn't know how to figure out which were missing It seemed that the ones missing were the most recent ones - the ones I wanted the most.

Now the stupid part (I apologize in advance). I tried moving the library to different places, both on new laptops HD and external HD), tried uninstalling Calibre and downloading it again. (I might have done some other stupid desperate stuff and not remember it; it was late at night and I was really upset and really desperate). The only thing I achieved is that now I can't use Calibre at all - it has a library with books in it (still 1,000 or so missing), but I can't do anything with them - can't add book, can't convert it or edit metadata - all those actions give me error messages.

I am at the end of my rope and I just want to start over!

(Have I mentioned that I'm leaving on vacation soon so I am desperate to fill my Kindle? )

PS My hubby (who is tech savvy in general but doesn't like to fuss with books like I do, so he uses Calibre JUST for conversion was able to dig out the hard disk from my dead laptop and connect it to my new one so I could get some of the stuff from it. Remember how I thought my main library was there? It turns out it was not...I)

[theducks]

As long as you COPY the CONTENTS of a known good library and TOTALLY replace the contents of the existing library, you are good.

Your OTHER settings (and plugins) are in your old (hidden)
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\calibre

Replace that and you are almost good to go (if your OLD library was on a different path, calibre will not find it.Just right-click the Library icon:create-switch: USE EXISTING: <path to where you put the Library>

[StellaTP]

Thank you for the response, theducks!


I found the original library just where you said it would be. My problem now is what to do wit Calibre itself? It is still showing me a library (one of the copies) but obviously a damaged one or unusable one, because everything I try to do gives me an error message.

For example, if I click on Add Books, I get this:

calibre, version 3.26.1
ERROR: Unhandled exception: <b>WindowsError</b>:[Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\actions\add.py", line 424, in add_books
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\win_file_dialogs.py", line 252, in choose_files
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\win_file_dialogs.py", line 185, in run_file_dialog
File "subprocess.py", line 711, in __init__
File "subprocess.py", line 959, in _execute_child
WindowsError: [Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified


How do I fix this? How do I make Calibre "forget" this library and point it to the correct one?

When I tried uninstalling and installing it again, it never asked me for a path to the library, it just goes to the bad one.

Originally Posted by theducks

As long as you COPY the CONTENTS of a known good library and TOTALLY replace the contents of the existing library, you are good.

Your OTHER settings (and plugins) are in your old (hidden)
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\calibre

Replace that and you are almost good to go (if your OLD library was on a different path, calibre will not find it.Just right-click the Library icon:create-switch: USE EXISTING: <path to where you put the Library>

[kovidgoyal]

That error does not have anything to do with the library. It means that something on your computer, most likely an antivirus has deleted one fo the calibre worker .exe files. You can re-install calibre and exclude it from your antivirus to fix the problem.