How do you maintain and backup your ebook library?

[Avalona]

Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx

[/B]

Avalona do you mean Adobe Digital Editions?

Can you import your ebooks generally into it?

Yep, Adobe Digital Editions. I started using it when the elibrary in my library system required it.

I haven't had a problem importing books into it, though if you want to do any editing, you have to use Calibre.

[Lizzie in Ma]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

I have my Calibre library in my Dropbox so it backs up there automatically which maintains an off site backup (and so I can access it from Calibre on my work computer too which means another backup is at work). I also keep a copy of everything on a USB stick and occasionally also backup also to a removable hard drive.

Me too.
I keep my Calibre library on a backup harddrive, Dropbox and I keep Calibre portable and my library on a usb drive.

[haydnfan]

Like others I use dropbox and an external hd as backups. I use calibre to strip off the drm and each ebook is available in mobi and epub in the dropbox archive and the calibre library on my two pcs as well as my external hd.

[Vala]

I just use Calibre and drop box for now. I am very new to all of this.

I wish I understood how to use Calibre to clean the books up. I guess I'll eventually learn. I do have them on two hard drives also.

[CommonReader]

I do back them up just the same way I do with all my other data - on an external hard drive and there is an additional hard drive I keep locked at my office. I update the latter about once a month.

[MikeOxlittle]

Calibre + Time Machine

Every few weeks or so I'll copy the entire library folder onto a seperate external hard drive from my backup disk.

[Lynx-lynx]

Originally Posted by Avalona

Yep, Adobe Digital Editions. I started using it when the elibrary in my library system required it.

I haven't had a problem importing books into it, though if you want to do any editing, you have to use Calibre.

Avalona have you tried changing your email account with Adobe?

I recently changed mine, and whilst it changes the Adobe account it doesn't change the ADE account email.

Separately I successfully changed the ADE account email - and therefore my books are now against my new email account.

However - when I was researching how to change the ADE email account I came across different comments on Google re how people had 'lost' access to their ADE books when they changed their Adobe email accounts.

Don't know if Adobe have changed the system to overcome this - but I contacted the on-line support via the on-line dialogue box and they helped me change mine over. Going by the name of the support person I'm guessing they were in Thailand, but I didn't have any comms problems.

[ebusinesstutor]

I use Calibre to manage my library. For backups, my entire hard drive is automatically backed up to Crashplan daily so I don't have to worry about it.

[Mistress]

I rarely ever obtain books with DRM still present these days, but when I do, I quickly clean that up. After that, I just dump the books into calibre and then let dropbox take care of everything. I should probably look into SSD storage as another safety net, but I keep all of my books on my device as it is - at this stage, I highly doubt that device, dropbox and calibre will fail at the same time.

[Joykins]

Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx

[/B]

Avalona do you mean Adobe Digital Editions?

Can you import your ebooks generally into it?

Yes, you can. That was my first attempt at managing ebooks, too--before Calibre.

[Rhialto]

Originally Posted by Vala

I just use Calibre and drop box for now. I am very new to all of this.

I wish I understood how to use Calibre to clean the books up. I guess I'll eventually learn. I do have them on two hard drives also.

Use Sigil. There is a forum on Mobileread that should get you started. I don't use it very often, but it is easy to use for the basics. Yesterday I cleaned up an epub that had multiple occurrences of the word "that" being rendered as "mat" by OCR. Find and replace in Sigil fixed about 40 of these in a minute or so. This was the only major problem with the book and made it much more readable.

[Quexos]

Personally I don't like calibre and I never used Sigil but I suspect I would not like it either. I like fix whenever possible my files myself.
And i don't back up my library, it's on my reader period. Got too many files to have to start bothering with doubles.

[Shaggy]

I have a NAS array on the home network that both my wife and I use for lots of different things, including ebooks. Every once in a while (meaning whenever I remember), it gets backed up to a DVD-R.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

I have my Calibre library in my Dropbox so it backs up there automatically which maintains an off site backup

I also back up my calibre library to Dropbox whenever I think of it. Could you tell me please how you make it back up to Dropbox automatically?

I also back up my ebooks folder (containing mainly all the ebooks I have designed) to Dropbox whenever I think of it, and would really like to know how to back up this folder automatically.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

I have a NAS array on the home network that both my wife and I use for lots of different things, including ebooks. Every once in a while (meaning whenever I remember), it gets backed up to a DVD-R.

Take care with a NAS. I used to use a Buffalo NAS. RAID 5, so I thought I was safe enough - after all, what are the odds of 2 drives in the array failing?

After about a year, the NAS box itself failed. The drives were fine - it was the motherboard on the NAS which had died. The unit had a 2-year warranty, so I thought that I was OK. I phoned Buffalo's tech support, only to be told that they couldn't send me a replacement "empty" NAS box that I could put my (perfectly OK) drives into; I had to send them back my complete NAS unit, and they'd send me a replacement - not with my drives in, but with new drives. In other words, there was no way for me to get my data back.

Luckily, I had a friend who had the same type of NAS, so I put my drives into his NAS box, and was able to copy all my data onto an external USB hard disk, but that experience made me very wary of NAS boxes - of Buffalo in particular.