Unutterably Silly So what are you doing RIGHT NOW?

[WT Sharpe]

Great news, Blossom.

[Shades67]

Originally Posted by Blossom

I'm watching my cats play tag. It's a miracle. Maisy my oldest has been on a Pepcid for three days and it is working. She has kept food down shows no signs of nausea. She's more energetic and she's seems able to get up and down better. She's 14 years old. The vet didn't have any real options. I refuse to give up that easy.

She woke me up this morning because she was bored. It's good to have my girl back.

Sent from my XT1528 using Tapatalk

Bolssom that is great news for Maisy and you too.

[badgoodDeb]

Glad to hear it, Blossom!

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

My master library lives in a Calibre Library directory on a hard drive. A copy lives on the USB thumb drive. I handle backup outside of Calibre itself. After a session of additions and library maintenance, I use an open source program called Free File Sync, and point it at the Calibre Library directory and the USB thumb drive. It analyzes both, the makes the necessary moves and changes to make the copy on the thumb drive a duplicate of what's on the hard drive.
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Dennis

I use a hard drive library and thumb drive backup, too. Thanks for the pointer to Free File Sync -- I'll give it a try. It sounds very useful!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

I use a hard drive library and thumb drive backup, too. Thanks for the pointer to Free File Sync -- I'll give it a try. It sounds very useful!

It works here, but you need to look at the docs and understand the options.

It has several different methods for determining what what to sync. The default is to look for differences in file size and time stamp. I had a case not that long back where Free File Sync thought everything had changed after a library update, and it wanted to sync multiple gigabytes of files.

The underlying issue was a change to Daylight Savings Time. Windows handled that automatically, but it meant every time stamp on the thumb drive was suddenly out of date as far as FFS was concerned. I had to turn off the time stamp check and have it just compare file size to sync the most recent changes.

It reinforced my hatred for DST and my wish the entire misbegotten notion would go away.
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Dennis

[badgoodDeb]

Hmmm. I wonder if the Mac handles DST the same way.

Since we seem to have more months ON DST than off, maybe I'll only backup in the months that ARE on DST. Or something. Or have a separate thumb drive to the non-DST months (and hence, two backups). Hmmm.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Hmmm. I wonder if the Mac handles DST the same way.

Since we seem to have more months ON DST than off, maybe I'll only backup in the months that ARE on DST. Or something. Or have a separate thumb drive to the non-DST months (and hence, two backups). Hmmm.

Macs should handle DST the same way Windows does, and automatically update the system's idea of what time it is when DST starts or ends. The fact that you are on a Mac won't affect the underlying issue.

The one time fix for me was to turn off the time stamp check when syncing after DST changed. It's on again now. (And that fix was solely a matter of not wanting to take the time required to update the entire library on the thumb drive, since the only thing that did change was the time stamp for all but the most recent additions. I cared that I had the current version of the files. I didn't care if the time stamp was off an hour.)

There's no need to add the additional complexity you are contemplating.
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Dennis

[badgoodDeb]

Oh, you can turn the time stamp back ON after the next backup, and life is OK again? Yes, that's easier. I thought you meant off permanently.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Oh, you can turn the time stamp back ON after the next backup, and life is OK again? Yes, that's easier. I thought you meant off permanently.

Should be.

But as mentioned, I was concerned with having the current files on the USB drive. New files on the HD library won't exist on the thumbdrive,and updated versions of existing files are almost certain to be be a different size. So for my purposes, whether I was checking time stamps as well as file sizes didn't matter. I turned time stamp checking back on for possible cases where it might, but since all I've actually used FFS for thus far is syncing the HD copy of the Calibre Library with the thumb drive copy, I could have just left it off.

(I do occasionally see cases where FFS decides many OPF files are out of sync and transfers fresh copies to the thumb drive. That may be an artifact of time stamps that would go away if I turned that off, but I just let it happen. I draw the line at transferring fresh copies of everything when the library is large enough I already had to migrate it to a larger thumb drive...)
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Dennis

[Shades67]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Whether you should have more tags will depend on the size of your library, the sort of things you read, and how hard it is to identify a specific volume in a search.

My eBook library is much larger than yours, and I consequently need finer distinctions and more tags.

One thing I've been looking at in the background is solutions outside of Calibre for some kinds of searches. Calibre does a wonderful job of searching the book's metadata to zero in on volumes. What I'd like to do in many cases is search the book's content. This is not something Calibre can do, and it's made more complicated by the number of eBook formats out there. By preference, I get volumes in ePub format, and can convert using Calibre if needed to something else. (My old Palm TX PDA has a Mobipocket viewer, for instance, but Palm went away before ePub was designed. I've use Calibre on occasion to convert ePub->Mobi so I can read a volume on the TX.

I also have books in PDF, DjVu, HTML and a few other forms. There doesn't happen to be a generalized search utility that can open all of them and search the content, and I'm not sure individual specialized tools exist for all of them.

What I would probably need to do is use Calibre to convert to HTML, for which search tools exist, but that's only reasonable for a small fraction of the total number I have.


An old friend talked about a "comfortable old shoe" feel for books he re-read. I thought that was apt. I have a few volumes I will re-read for precisely that reason. I am already very familiar with the book, and may have read it many times, but it fits a particular mood and gets the nod. (Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a particular example here.)


My master library lives in a Calibre Library directory on a hard drive. A copy lives on the USB thumb drive. I handle backup outside of Calibre itself. After a session of additions and library maintenance, I use an open source program called Free File Sync, and point it at the Calibre Library directory and the USB thumb drive. It analyzes both, the makes the necessary moves and changes to make the copy on the thumb drive a duplicate of what's on the hard drive.
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Dennis

Thank you again Dennis. Saving your information here to use as I have time. I agree the quantity in a persons library would have a lot to do with number of tags needed.

Great information on saving to thumb drive and External drive and the sync link. I will put this to good use for sure. Would be a shame to go through all of this work on Calibre then lose it to an electronics failure. Curious if also all the books transfer with this saving? I suppose it would save all of them??

Another busy day catching up from being gone yesterday and another trip to dump with all tree trimmings and then to town and pharmacy. WOO HOO Saved an extra $5.00 by pulling up the good RX website to actually show at the pharmacy that walmart had the lower price. I do not like walmart but enjoyed my pharmacy cutting the $$ off my cost because they promise to match prices if you can prove it online. I do not have a cell phone that does internet. So my cheepo little RCA machine could end up paying for itself as time goes on for both myself and hubby. Would not take many purchases. Last time it saved me $31.00. I think I will keep track to see how long it does take. Just for giggles and grins.

Fresh fish for dinner. Have a nice generous friend share his catch of the day. Perch. Coleslaw and oven fries for hubby. I will have a small chunk of chuck steak with my fish. I am on a fussy, to some, diet.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Shades67

Thank you again Dennis. Saving your information here to use as I have time. I agree the quantity in a persons library would have a lot to do with number of tags needed.

You're quite welcome.

Great information on saving to thumb drive and External drive and the sync link. I will put this to good use for sure. Would be a shame to go through all of this work on Calibre then lose it to an electronics failure. Curious if also all the books transfer with this saving? I suppose it would save all of them??

Yes, they will.

Your Calibre library is a directory on your hard drive, with sub-directories below it. Calibre creates directories as needed as you add books to the library. They get stored in directories that are the names of the authors, in Last Name, First Name format. More books by an existing author get stored in that author's directory.

Here, the master is in D:\Calibre Library and below. Books I download get downloaded to d:\eBooks\Add to Calibre, and Calibre adds them from that specified location. It makes a copy of the downloaded book in the library it maintains, so after they've been added to Calibre, I delete them from the download directory.

Free File Sync mirrors directories between drives. Point it at a source directory and a destination directory, and anything in the source directory that isn't in the destination directory gets transferred. That happens for new files that don't exist, and existing files that have newer versions in the source directory.

This happens outside of Calibre, and simply copies files. FFS doesn't care what's in the file - only whether it exists in the current form in the directories you are synchronizing. (If you remove books from your master Calibre library, FFS will remove them from the thumb drive too, since the goal is the same contents in both locations.)
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Dennis

[Blossom]

I'm hoping for internet to be restored here. We just got power back after six and half hours. It's been a very long stressful day.

[WT Sharpe]

What happened to the power? Was it a storm?

[WT Sharpe]

I see. 70 MPH winds in some places. Was there much damage in your neighborhood, Blossom?

St. Louis Area Hit By Damaging Storms; More Than 200,000 Lose Power

[Rumpelteazer]

I've just dyed my hair and I'm now waiting until I can rinse it out. When I get back from d dog sitting in August I'm going to look into getting contact lenses again. My eyes get irritated when I'm wearing the monthly contacts, hopefully my eyes won't row a for south daily contacts. I don't want to wear them every day, but contact are beget than glasses on days it's hot, for days out, or when dyeing my hair.

Sent from my SM-T713 using Tapatalk

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I see. 70 MPH winds in some places. Was there much damage in your neighborhood, Blossom?

St. Louis Area Hit By Damaging Storms; More Than 200,000 Lose Power

Not here but down the road it snapped one of those heavy metal utility poles in half and in another part of town it pulled a giant oak up by the roots. The news didn't report it but it was a gustnado which is something I've never seen before. It was surreal watching it from my windows. I lived in the mountains so I'm use to strong winds. I went through two hurricanes when I lived by the beach but this was wind with strong rotation. You could see all kinds of debree flying out there in a circular pattern.

Internet is still down. I will be cleaning out the fridge today. We had just went shopping so the fridge was full.