Updating Book details

[Wistow]

I am new to Calibre and trying to get my head around the way it works, my first confusion was I was expecting an indexing program not one that copied all of my books into one place, i can live with that.
My problem is that once imported I find I have the same book with slightly different author or title spellings, I went through the books and made changes in Calibre to get everything right using merge to get the different formats showing together.

Does Calibre move the books into the one folder on the disk and delete the empty folders?

Do all of the changes I have made to the names get written to the individual book files or the metadata files in each folder?

If not how do I prevent having to do this work all over again if something goes wrong on the disk or the library gets corrupted?

Thanks for any help with my questions
Graham

[itimpi]

When you do a merge then the files get moved into one folder (and any empty ones get deleted). Metadata does not actually get updated inside the book files until you do a Save to disk/device or use one of the explicit options to update the metadata inside the files.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Wistow

If not how do I prevent having to do this work all over again if something goes wrong on the disk or the library gets corrupted?

Do as you do with any other data you don't want to lose - back it up regularly.

See ==>> How do I backup calibre?

I use a folder/file synchronisation tool to back up all my data, including calibre's libraries and configuration data. I do it daily to local storage (external USB 3.0 drives) and weekly to a ftp service.

BR

[Wistow]

Thanks for your replies

does the information get stored inside the book file like mp3 tags or is it stored only in the opf file?

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Wistow

does the information get stored inside the book file like mp3 tags or is it stored only in the opf file?

Yes and no. Most formats have metadata inside them. But, when you edit the metadata in calibre it updates the database and then the OPF. It will update the file when you do something like send the book to a device, or export it using save to disk. There are ways to update the copy inside the library, but, in general it isn't needed.