How do you keep and use your library?

[Ripplinger]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

I think you're overestimating the time needed for it. I've purchased five books this morning, and in around half hour I had them in calibre with the right metadata, added to goodreads, converted three of them and loaded in my device (backed in dropbox as my main device library is in dropbox), and all of them were backed in an USB. The HD backup is once a week.

Takes me a few minutes, and that's just loading into Calibre and transferring to my reader. The backups to the other 3 hard drives are done nightly by automated tasks, I don't have to touch anything else. Maybe once every few months I'll bother with uploading to my online server, DropBox, and my netbook only when I plan on taking it with me.

So yes, definitely overestimating the time the backups take.

[CRussel]

Into Calibre, which strips the DRM thanks to Alf. Calibre itself is backed up to a local disk, a network share, my laptop, and up to One Drive. I usually sync the One Drive every couple of weeks.

And, honestly, I could still download all of them from the original sources. (Mostly Kobo and Amazon.)

[cfrizz]

I have my library on my pc in Sony Reader software, Calibre, and in a file in my documents folder entitled My ebooks. and I also have them backed up to an Iomega hard drive.

I also have my entire library on the following portable devices. Sony PRS-T1, Samsung MP5, Samsung Note 2, and Nexus 7 tablet.

[Katsunami]

I have a workflow to maintain and backup my library. It has changed somewhat over the years, but now it is as follows:

- Download the book from the vendor (ADE, Kindle App...).
- Import it into Calibre, where Alf removes DRM.
- Save the book to disk to keep an unmodified original.
- Do whatever I want to do in Calibre (metadata, fix, convert).

This puts an un-DRM-ed original on my hard disk, seperate from Calibre, and a completely fixed, converted, page-counted, etc... book in Calibre. This process will take me about 1-3 minutes for a newly downloaded book.

Backup is done to three separate hard disks, automatically, one after another, overnight:
- A 3.5 inch desktop hard disk.
- A 2.5 inch notebook hard disk, to be put into my vault.

The third is also a 2.5 inch hard disk, which is stored off-site, and will be swapped periodically with the one in the vault.

I create backups whenever something big changes on my computer, but the minimum is at least once a week. (This backup also contains all of my other data besides books, which is mostly music ripped in FLAC from my own CD-collection, ISO files created from software disks, and game installers downloaded from GOG.com.)

[cadele]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I have a workflow to maintain and backup my library. It has changed somewhat over the years, but now it is as follows:

- Download the book from the vendor (ADE, Kindle App...).
- Import it into Calibre, where Alf removes DRM.
- Save the book to disk to keep an unmodified original.
- Do whatever I want to do in Calibre (metadata, fix, convert).

This puts an un-DRM-ed original on my hard disk, seperate from Calibre, and a completely fixed, converted, page-counted, etc... book in Calibre. This process will take me about 1-3 minutes for a newly downloaded book.

Backup is done to three separate hard disks, automatically, one after another, overnight:
- A 3.5 inch desktop hard disk.
- A 2.5 inch notebook hard disk, to be put into my vault.

The third is also a 2.5 inch hard disk, which is stored off-site, and will be swapped periodically with the one in the vault.

I create backups whenever something big changes on my computer, but the minimum is at least once a week. (This backup also contains all of my other data besides books, which is mostly music ripped in FLAC from my own CD-collection, ISO files created from software disks, and game installers downloaded from GOG.com.)

You are very organised!

I am intrigued as to why you keep an unDRMEd original on your hard drive separate to Calibre - I wonder if I should be doing this.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

- Save the book to disk to keep an unmodified original.

That isn't an unmodified original. Save-to-disk (by default) updates metadata in the saved copy. Personally, I don't see why it is needed. Metadata updates are non-lossy, and anyway if you use snapshotted backups you can always revert to the first version.

[jjansen]

I don't do anything special now. The books are downloaded to my laptop and the DRMs are stripped as they are loaded into Calibre. I use SugarSync instead of dropbox as it works with any file structure. Sugarysync constantly keeps my home PC library synchronized with Calibre on my laptop and another copy in the cloud is kept sync'ed also. The cloud keeps about 5 versions of deleted or modified files including the metadata file.........Jackie

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by cadele

You are very organised!

Thanks All of my personal files are organised as perfectly as humanly possible, be they e-books, music, or documents. My paper administration, on the other hand...

*shudders*

I've been thinking to start scanning my paper administration as soon as it comes in, and just stick the real documents into an organizer, one after another. The digital versions will be much faster to find if I ever need them.

I am intrigued as to why you keep an unDRMEd original on your hard drive separate to Calibre - I wonder if I should be doing this.

Why? No reason, really. I could just as well remove all Calibre data from the e-books using the Modify EPUB plugin, and then export the entire library. I just like the idea of having the original file on hand if I ever need it. It doesn't take space enough to worry about.

Originally Posted by eschwartz

That isn't an unmodified original. Save-to-disk (by default) updates metadata in the saved copy. Personally, I don't see why it is needed. Metadata updates are non-lossy, and anyway if you use snapshotted backups you can always revert to the first version.

I think this is a bit of a smartass remark. Obviously some bytes will have changed in the exported file, be it only some calibre stuff that's inserted into the OPF-file. I don't really care about that. With "unmodified original", I mean a book that has not had it's layout or CSS changed, didn't get a new cover or metadata updates, that sort of thing.

Also, I don't use snapshot backups. I want only complete, file-based backups that I can access on any computer, on any operating system, without using any special programs.

[eschwartz]

What is the difference between a metadata cover update and a metadata title update? I've seen some interesting first-time import author mangling myself, depending how the author metadata was originally specified...

And regarding snapshotting backups -- I agree, which is unsurprising for a linux enthusiast and if you check out the link I posted earlier on how I achieve my backups you will see they are indeed file-based, complete backups that can be accessed via nothing more esoteric than a bog-standard file browser.
Although as they are backed by an ext3 filesystem, I am afraid they aren't accessible from any OS.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

What is the difference between a metadata cover update and a metadata title update? I've seen some interesting first-time import author mangling myself, depending how the author metadata was originally specified...

When saving the original, I don't really take metadata into account. I actually expect to never, ever need the originals again, but I just keep them... just in case. They don't take up a meaningful amount of space.

And regarding snapshotting backups -- I agree, which is unsurprising for a linux enthusiast and if you check out the link I posted earlier on how I achieve my backups you will see they are indeed file-based, complete backups that can be accessed via nothing more esoteric than a bog-standard file browser.
Although as they are backed by an ext3 filesystem, I am afraid they aren't accessible from any OS.

Maybe I should have said "accessible from any computer" Even if your drives are EXT3, it's simple enough to boot the computer using a live Linux distro and get at your files that way.

What I despise is a 'backup' for which you need to have the original backup program installed to read and recover it. That's useless. A good backup should not put the files into a proprietary backup format.

[GERGE]

By the way, if you are syncing between to computers, I recommend you to take a look at Syncthing. It is kind of awesome. Best tool I have seen yet for this purpose.

[Katsunami]

Personally, I would never put any of my data into a cloud service. It has happened too often that such services behaved erratically, like closing 'suspicious accounts,' or have been hacked big time.

[bookaho!ic]

I keep unread books on kobo aura. All books go onto ade and back up one a month to external storage. Tried de drm in calibre and could not be bothered to be honest i like kobo and if device fails i would get another kobo

[Tarana]

My purchased ebooks and magazines are in my computer, on an external, on a flash drive and on my sister's external at her house. Whenever I get a new ebook, I put it into Dropbox and my sister adds it to the backup (and her collection if it is of interest to her). I'm currently working on organizing and backing up all my audios from Audible. One drive will be at her house. I do the same thing with photos.

I do use both Walgreens and Drop box for photo backup as well. It's automatic.

I used to use an SD card for the elibrary backup, but when I found out some older SD cards were no longer supported, I became a bit leery of continuing to do that. It was a great idea while it lasted though. The flash drives are fine though.

[GERGE]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Personally, I would never put any of my data into a cloud service. It has happened too often that such services behaved erratically, like closing 'suspicious accounts,' or have been hacked big time.

My cloud service is mine. My own VPS. And I keep weekly snapshots.