Another Collections question

[tadpole]

So I have officially named my Kobo Aura HD....Regan, (homage to the Exorcist) being as this thing is totally possessed!

Yesterday, I wanted to add another book via calibre. It took 39m43s to scan the device and when I unplugged, it froze. Then it began to restart. Next it asked me what language I wanted to use and when it came back up ALL my books were gone! I was sick! And when I say ALL books I mean 5000+! I put my books on the SD card. (I never know what my mood will be and I want options due to frequent travel.)

It was still acting funny so, since the books were gone I did a factory reset. When completed, it started processing content. That took 18 hours! To my great relief, when I awoke this morning, all my books were back!

My problem now is, there 16 pages of collections, (randomly mixed) that I can not delete nor can I figure out how to sort them. My collections are the authors name by the way. Previously they were sorted alphabetically by the first name.

Does anyone have any suggestion on how to delete these? I thought about taking the SD card out and doing another factory reset, but feel that when I put the card back, it may take another 18 hours to process content.

Thanks in advance for any and all help.

[PeterT]

The standard advice to clean up duplicate collections is to use the Kobo Utilities plugin in calibre.

[hleo12]

I also had this problem. You can see the thread here

It is only happening to books that I have on the sd card. The solution I found, as PeterT suggested is to use the Kobo plugin in Calibre to manage your Collections. It can also delete those collections that you can't delete (assuming that some of them are duplicate).

I now only let Calibre create my collections for me, less hassle that way.

[filmo]

Use Calibre to manage your books is good advice.

With 5000+ books should have backup copies of your library.

[tadpole]

Thanks to all for the responses. I resorted to doing another couple of factory resets. I also did a format of the SD card. (Thankfully I have all my books on my computer as back up) Things appear fine until I put the SD back into the Aura. Then the collections appear again! I looked and actually installed the kobo utilities plug-in, but can not figure out how to do the collections. (I am no the most computer savy) Is there a step by step tutorial somewhere on how to use the kobo plug in?

Thanks again for all the help.

[PeterT]

The collections come back from the Kobo Cloud.

With the SD card in your device, and all the collections showing, connect to your PC.

In calibre select Kobo Utilities and then select Database and Fix Duplicate Shelves. Choose whether to keep the Oldest or Newest shelves and then click OK.

This will go through and remove the extra shelves, and also flag them so that the next sync to the Kobo cloud will remove them from the Kobo cloud.

Then eject and all is done.

To be safe, I'd then do a sync with Kobo, either via WiFi or Kobo Desktop.

As far as setting up and managing the collections, total handle that via calibre. See Quick Guide to Shelf Management with calibre 0.9.1 & above (Touch / Glo / Mini /Aura)

[tadpole]

Thanks PeterT, I reinstalled the kobo utilities plug in and followed the instruction from the link that you sent, but am unable to get it to work. I keep getting a Unhandled exception error. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it again and still am getting the error. Don't suppose that you would have a magical solution for this would you?

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by tadpole

Thanks PeterT, I reinstalled the kobo utilities plug in and followed the instruction from the link that you sent, but am unable to get it to work. I keep getting a Unhandled exception error. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it again and still am getting the error. Don't suppose that you would have a magical solution for this would you?

Can you post the error you are seeing? That should tell me what is going wrong.

[tadpole]

I cannot believe that I got this image to work!

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by tadpole

I cannot believe that I got this image to work!

Unfortunately, that doesn't tell me enough. Press the "Copy to clipboard" button and post that. Also, what version of calibre and the plugin are you using?

[tadpole]

Of course the internet went out just as I tried to post this last night. I am not sure if this is what you were asking for. I am not familiar with the clipboard of calibre. The kobo utilities is 1.7.1

calibre 1.41 isfrozen: True is64bit: False
Windows-7-6.1.7601-SP1 Windows ('32bit', 'WindowsPE')
32bit process running on 64bit windows
('Windows', '7', '6.1.7601')
Python 2.7.5
Windows: ('7', '6.1.7601', 'SP1', 'Multiprocessor Free')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "calibre_plugins.koboutilities.action", line 1169, in fix_duplicate_shelves
File "calibre_plugins.koboutilities.dialogs", line 2342, in __init__
File "calibre_plugins.koboutilities.dialogs", line 2435, in populate_table
File "calibre_plugins.koboutilities.dialogs", line 2457, in populate_table_row
TypeError: arguments did not match any overloaded call:
QTableWidgetItem(int type=QTableWidgetItem.Type): argument 1 has unexpected type 'NoneType'
QTableWidgetItem(QString, int type=QTableWidgetItem.Type): argument 1 has unexpected type 'NoneType'
QTableWidgetItem(QIcon, QString, int type=QTableWidgetItem.Type): argument 1 has unexpected type 'NoneType'
QTableWidgetItem(QTableWidgetItem): argument 1 has unexpected type 'NoneType'

[davidfor]

tadpole: That is really strange. From that, there is a collection on your device that doesn't have a name. I have never seen that and don't know how it could happen. I will add some code to handle this.

[davidfor]

I have made the changes and uploaded a beta version. The reason it is a beta is that it also has the changes needed for the Qt5 version of calibre that is in beta. The plugin will work with the released version of calibre. I am not quite ready to release this, so pleas download it from https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2875183.

The change I have made for this problem is to use "(Unnamed shelf)" as the name of the shelf when there is no name. If there are duplicated shelves like this, they will not be removed. If that is needed, I will need to look into what is happening to cause this.

[tadpole]

Thanks for the reply davidfor. Before all this headache started, when I would load on a new book or books and then try to open collections, at the top of my list there was always a blank folder. For the longest it contained one book from one of my collections. But I would just delete the thing and go about as normal. Then one day I deleted the book that appeared in this folder and reloaded it and then put it in the proper collection. From then on the folder would still appear, but minus the book.

As for my current situation, I have sort of cheated. I guess due in part to my being somewhat impatient and wanting to get things back to where they were. I opened up a new kobo account and did yet another factory reset, but this time used the new account. And voila! No more collections! I did run into the problem of not being able to have the option of sorting my collections, but thanks to this forum and to you and Ogion I was able to add the missing text in the Kobo eReader.conf file and now all seems to be well. And there is no more blank collections folder either!

I still want to concur this kobo utility plug in for future reference. Since things have been going well, I have not gotten the courage to try it again. Guess that I should do that soon. After I get the download that you have provided. Thanks again!

[tadpole]

So another question, I downloaded the new plug in. I have not side loaded a plug in before. Do I unzip the file or not? And if I open it, exactly which part do I load?

Thanks again