need help with hard drive cleanup

[elemenoP]

I am on a mac and my hard drive came dangerously close to being full. Now I am trying to do a very thorough cleanup. Help me understand what to do about my book files.

- There are a lot of epub files in my Downloads folder, some with names I can read and some without. When I put books into Calibre, Calibre makes a copy so I can delete all the epub files in my Downloads folder, correct?

- I use Sony Reader Library to convert acsm files to epub. Then I bring the epub into Calibre. Again, since Calibre makes a copy of the epub, I could delete all the epubs in Documents / My Books / Reader Library, correct? How about the xml files in there? I guess those are needed for the Reader library database?

- I was also putting all my borrowed library books in Calibre, and then deleting them after reading. But I have discovered that I was only deleting the entry in Calibre, not the epub file.* So now I have a LOT of epub files on my hard drive, that I don't want. Can you think of any way to "look for" these? In other words, find epubs which are NOT in Calibre, in order to delete them? Or do I just have to look at all my epubs and remember which are library books?

*A suggestion to Calibre developers: when I delete a song in iTunes, it asks me if I want to delete the file as well. Same with Lightroom: when I delete a photo from the Lightroom database, it asks me if I want to delete the file. I think Calibre should work the same way.

Thanks for any help!
eP

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by elemenoP

- There are a lot of epub files in my Downloads folder, some with names I can read and some without. When I put books into Calibre, Calibre makes a copy so I can delete all the epub files in my Downloads folder, correct?

- I use Sony Reader Library to convert acsm files to epub. Then I bring the epub into Calibre. Again, since Calibre makes a copy of the epub, I could delete all the epubs in Documents / My Books / Reader Library, correct? How about the xml files in there? I guess those are needed for the Reader library database?

- I was also putting all my borrowed library books in Calibre, and then deleting them after reading. But I have discovered that I was only deleting the entry in Calibre, not the epub file.* So now I have a LOT of epub files on my hard drive, that I don't want. Can you think of any way to "look for" these? In other words, find epubs which are NOT in Calibre, in order to delete them? Or do I just have to look at all my epubs and remember which are library books?

*A suggestion to Calibre developers: when I delete a song in iTunes, it asks me if I want to delete the file as well. Same with Lightroom: when I delete a photo from the Lightroom database, it asks me if I want to delete the file. I think Calibre should work the same way.

Thanks for any help!
eP

Yes, Calibre keeps its own database, including the book files. If it's in there, you can delete all other copies of your books, wherever they are (assuming you keep your Calibre setup backup up, yadda yadda...)

And what your suggestion is concerned, it already does. When you delete a book from Calibre, it's gone, metadata and ebook file(s) (which is why it does warn you when you do it, unless you have disabled that warning).

So I don't really get how you could put books in Calibre (using the Calibre GUI, that is) and then 'only delete the entry in Calibre'; I don't think there is a way to do that, normally... You can run Library Maintenance to clean out all stuff that's in the Calibre library directory structure that's not in the database; that should take care of them.

But how you got there in the first place...I can only think of it being the other way round (database entries that refer to files on disk that don't exist) when you have been messing about in the library directory structure from outside Calibre itself (using the OS).

[Bobioden]

If you are trying to cleanup your hard drive, getting rid of books should be your least concern. My 4500 books takes up 2.3gb of space. That includes all the jpg's associated with the books.

A better way to cleanup is getting rid of any movies, and videos you might have. A single movie can be 4-6gbs. They add up very fast.

[BetterRed]

@elemenoP - following on from Bobioden's suggestion, this may help you identify what's using space - http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=14356

@mbovenka - if the OP put the 'borrowed' books into separate libraries based on loan expiry date, and then removed the libraries when the loan period expired, then the library folders would still be on the disk.

BR

[Bookworm_Girl]

Yes, you can delete the files from your downloads folder. You also might have random books still existing in folders related to Sony Reader software, Adobe Digital Editions, Kindle for Mac etc. You could try a search on ePub and other file formats to see where else they might be residing as duplicates. For example, I borrow and buy EPUBs using the Sony software. Then load in calibre and use it to transfer to my ereader. When I delete a borrowed book as in your example, I remove the record and the file from calibre. Then I remove it from the Sony Reader folder. Then I do a global search to make sure I got all copies.

Another tip is that I have added my calibre library folder in my Finder Window quick links on the left column so I have easy access to it.

I second the recommendation to look at your video storage. I cleaned up quite a bit of space by both storing videos on an external drive and by deleting copies from my hard-drive that exist in the cloud and can be redownload or restored from backups.

For me it is videos, music and photos that eat up space quickly.
Another suggestion is that you could remove public domain books from your library as those could also be easily re-downloaded.

[elemenoP]

Thanks, maybe it was all the duplicate files that were making me think that Calibre is not deleting the underlying files. I will try deleting something in Calibre and see what happens.

And yes, I am well aware that the ebooks are trivial compared to videos and photos. I found a program that looks for duplicates and I have already deleted about 15gb this way, and I have a lot more work to do on that. I also found about 15gb in old Lightroom backup files! And after that I hope to dive into my 40,000 or so photos in Lightroom, and start deleting the "bad" ones. I also found some huge TIFF files that I can convert to high-quality jpgs.

The problem is, now I am obsessed, and I would like to delete ALL unnecessary files, even the small ones. Well maybe not ALL, but I will keep at it until I get sick of it.

You know, I just did a search on my hard drive to find the largest epub file I have. It's 333mb, that's pretty large. And it's "Yellow Submarine" by the Beatles, and I didn't know I have it and I don't know what it is (as a book, I mean). I guess it came with iBooks.

eP

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@@mbovenka - if the OP put the 'borrowed' books into separate libraries based on loan expiry date, and then removed the libraries when the loan period expired, then the library folders would still be on the disk.

BR

Yup, that would do it. Didn't think of that (as I don't use separate libraries much, if at all).