Cold Storage, not active path

[remy]

Hello,
I'm trying to find out how I can manage my library with some of the books on my local hard drive, and some of the books (the majority) in a storage directory, not necessarily accessible all the time.

The principle is to have a list of current books, and books with rare use, which do not need to take up disk space on my laptop

What do you think ?
Thanks

[Sirtel]

Two separate libraries is probably the only way to achieve this.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by remy

...and some of the books (the majority) in a storage directory, not necessarily accessible all the time.

Beware of using networked storage for a calibre library. See the calibre FAQ: I am getting errors with my calibre library on a networked drive/NAS?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by remy;4139550/

Hello,
I'm trying to find out how I can manage my library with some of the books on my local hard drive, and some of the books (the majority) in a storage directory, not necessarily accessible all the time.

The principle is to have a list of current books, and books with rare use, which do not need to take up disk space on my laptop

What do you think ?

I'd move the rarely used books to a separate library on an external drive, if you try to access the library from calibre and the drive is disconnected or powered down you'll get this:



Just connect/power up the drive and press enter.

I'd use an external hard disk on a USB 3.x port.

BR

[remy]

Thanks !
I suspected the answer about the separate library, which I wanted to avoid ....
I prefer the idea of having all the references of my books in one place to simply search on all the titles. And if needed to connect to the temporary directory to open the book itself.
Unfortunately this seems to be a non-standard use case.

[davidfor]

You could put use one library with all the book details in it. Then archive the books elsewhere and store a reference to the book location. You could probably use an identifier with a file URL for when the drive with these books are connected. Or a custom column with it. Something like this is used by people to refer to non-book references.

As a NAS was mentioned above, if you have one and it can run calibre, you could put the archived books on that and access them via the calibre server. If you did this, the reference could be a link to the book via the calibre server.

And for any bored developers out there, that is screaming for a plugin. Have function to send the book to the server using calibredb, add the reference details to the local library, and then later fetch the book using that reference. Then some functions to update metadata on the server if you change it locally. "Easy" for any developer now that I've written the requirements

[BetterRed]

• Tag the books you don't want on the laptop with Ωoffline
• Create an Offline virtual library (VL) with search term tags:"=Ωoffline"
• Create an Offline physical library on an external drive.
• Copy the books in the Offline VL to the Offline physical library
• Delete all the format files in the Offline VL

That will leave a record of all the books on the laptop, and provide a separate library for the storage of 'rarely wanted' format files (EPUB, PDF etc)

You could maybe even use calibre://view-book/ links in a custom column to open format files in the Offline library from the laptop library, see calibre://view-book/

Added: There's also the CalibreSpy plugin, it allows you to open a second library for read only, it would be less work that adding url links (which can break) but not as direct.

BR