Deleting ebooks and re-searching

[Fenrir007]

Greetings,

It is my understanding that Calibre doesn't alter the actual location of your ebooks, instead just messing with its mirrored library. So, if I delete an ebook, it gets deleted from the Calibre mirror library, but not from the actual hard disk.

What I'd like to know is how I can prevent it from reading ebooks I previosly deleted from the Calibre library when I do a new search of my ebooks dump folder (a folder where I just throw every ebook I acquire) to get the new ebooks I got.

Also, is it possible to make Calibre delete a book from both its mirror library and the original location of the ebook (effectively destroying all traces of it from my PC)?

Bonus question unrelated to Calibre - is there an easy way (with some software or whatnot) of purging a tree of folders of all .docs, .htmls and .txt? Subfolders included.

Thanks!

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Fenrir007

It is my understanding that Calibre doesn't alter the actual location of your ebooks, instead just messing with its mirrored library. So, if I delete an ebook, it gets deleted from the Calibre mirror library, but not from the actual hard disk.

True

Originally Posted by Fenrir007

What I'd like to know is how I can prevent it from reading ebooks I previosly deleted from the Calibre library when I do a new search of my ebooks dump folder (a folder where I just throw every ebook I acquire) to get the new ebooks I got.

Scrap the 'ebook dump folder' and use the Calibre library copy as the primary copy, and take regular backups of your Calibre library folder(s).

Originally Posted by Fenrir007

Also, is it possible to make Calibre delete a book from both its mirror library and the original location of the ebook (effectively destroying all traces of it from my PC)?

No, calibre is an ebook library manager not a replacement for a file manager. If you heed prior advice - scrap the 'ebook dump folder' - then this question becomes redundant.

Originally Posted by Fenrir007

Bonus question unrelated to Calibre - is there an easy way (with some software or whatnot) of purging a tree of folders of all .docs, .htmls and .txt? Subfolders included.

Many ways - suggest you ask the question in a forum that's specific to the OS you use - Windows, OS/X or Linux.

For Windows 7 I like this one Windows 7 Help Forums, there are similar forums for XP, Vista and Windows 8

BR

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Fenrir007

Bonus question unrelated to Calibre - is there an easy way (with some software or whatnot) of purging a tree of folders of all .docs, .htmls and .txt? Subfolders included.

As BetterRed said.

On linux I would use something like this terminal command (from the root of the target folder tree):

find . -name "*.bak" -type f -delete

To remove multiple filetypes:

find . -regex ".*\.\(txt\|doc\|html\)$" -type f -delete

[Fenrir007]

Thank you both for your input, greatly appreciate it!

Originally Posted by BetterRed

True

Scrap the 'ebook dump folder' and use the Calibre library copy as the primary copy, and take regular backups of your Calibre library folder(s).

Hmm I can't really scrap it due to some particular reasons. I will try and reestructure the dump folder in a way I know where to look for newer ebooks (maybe create folders by date and add ebooks to them according to the date they were added).

So, my only way of adding the books I recently put in the ebook dump folder would be to search everything again (since I cannot pinpoint where and which ebooks I added), right? If I do that, what happens with the ebooks already in my library - will duplicates appear or will Calibre recognize previously added ebooks that are still in the library and avoid re-adding them?

PS.: I have no idea why I get a huge white space under my posts. Firefox issue?

[eschwartz]

Possibly use a pimary dump folder that adds the books to calibre and moves them to the secondary dump folder?

[BetterRed]

semi-automate

Originally Posted by Fenrir007

Thank you both for your input, greatly appreciate it!



Hmm I can't really scrap it due to some particular reasons. I will try and reestructure the dump folder in a way I know where to look for newer ebooks (maybe create folders by date and add ebooks to them according to the date they were added).

So, my only way of adding the books I recently put in the ebook dump folder would be to search everything again (since I cannot pinpoint where and which ebooks I added), right? If I do that, what happens with the ebooks already in my library - will duplicates appear or will Calibre recognize previously added ebooks that are still in the library and avoid re-adding them?

PS.: I have no idea why I get a huge white space under my posts. Firefox issue?

I use firefox and I don't see any huge white space under any posts, including yours. Trying running firefox barebones - Help->Restart with addons disabled. My guess is that its an ad blocker or something.

You could sort your dump folder by date created. This should be the date the file was created in the folder, you may have to get your file manager to display date created.

If you create a new library and add everything that's in your dump file to it, then you might be able to use the inter-library feature of the Find Duplicate plugin - you would discard the duplicates, and deal with the others as you saw fit.

Suggest in future you download books into folder Folder A. Then copy books from Folder A to Folder B which calibre uses as its Auto Add folder, then move the books to your ebook dump file. A simple batch/script file can do the copying from A to B and moving from A to your ebook dump file. Which is a long-winded way of saying what eschwartz last said

BR

[Fenrir007]

Thanks for the assistance, guys. I think I will be better off restarting my library from scratch, and take the opportunity slowly add things to it. My tags are all over the place anyway (probably shouldnt have ticked all of the tagging services)