Recovering library from old computer.

[Strat O'Saurus]

I have a new laptop (Windows 10, unfortunately) and want to recover the epubs currently in my old laptop (W8.1). I've tried to copy the epubs to a flash drive, then past them into a new folder in Documents, but so far without success.

Any hints to accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Strat

[davidfor]

If you are just copying the books, you need to add them to calibre. Either drag-and-drop them in the calibre interface, or configure calibre to add them from the directory they are in.

A better way, assuming the old laptop is working, start calibre and do an export. Do this by right-clicking the library button to find the option and follow the prompts. The export will include the preferences. Then copy the produced files to the new machine and do an import.

You can also copy the library folder from one machine to the other. And then add it as a library to calibre (right-click the library button and choose "Switch/create library"). This can have problems because of the directory names used for the books. Running the library maintenance tools afterwards is probably a good idea. You can copy the configuration over separately if you want to.

[theducks]

DO NOTE: If you use the EXPORT TOOL,
YOU USE THE IMPORT TOOL, not the Add books button.

EXPORT just gathers all the pieces and wraps them up nice and tidy for transport (in as many 'spanned zip' archives as needed. You need to always use the entire set as a whole. don't lose a piece if you use multiple media . ) .

[dwig]

Originally Posted by Strat O'Saurus

I have a new laptop (Windows 10, unfortunately) and want to recover the epubs currently in my old laptop (W8.1). I've tried to copy the epubs to a flash drive, then past them into a new folder in Documents, but so far without success.

Any hints to accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Strat

Since this thread is in the calibre forum I assume that the old laptop has the ebooks in a calibre library. If that is not the case, there are a plethora of other issues that dictate what steps are best. Also, if the ebooks are "burdened" with DRM there will be other steps necessary whether they have been managed by calibre or not.

The suggestion by theducks to use the EXPORT and IMPORT functions is an excellent method provided the old Win8.1 laptop still works well and you can still run calibre on that machine.

An alternate method that works when you can access the old HD but can't run calibre or don't have enough drive space to create the Export file set is to simply copy the whole calibre Library folder (top level folder and all files and subfolders) to the new machine. If the new machine has a "virgin" calibre installation, you would simply replace the new machine's empty Library folder with the one copied from the old machine.

[stumped]

that calibre looks for, to determine if a folder is a calibre library or not, is the existence of a file called metadata.db. it is easy to miss that when doing file copies as it is a hidden file in some setups, but if it does not exist , calibre will conclude no library at this location.
If that file is lost, you have to create a new library in an empty folder by using the add books function