Aura H2O Annotations disappeared of SD card epubs!

[locus]

Hi all,

Yesterday I accidentally removed the SD card from Kobo Aura H20. When I turned on I discovered that the books from the SD card were no there anymore. I then put the SD card back inside, I found again the books (there was a kind of processing percentage displayed in the screen) but not the annotations! Also bookmarks, percentage and everything disappeared.

Is this a known problem? does anyone know how to fix this?

Cheers!

[abij]

Hello,

I may not comment on whether turning on Kobo with empty SD slot will erase previously present annotations. But if you happen to use KOReader and if you'd like to try to recover annotations etc. through recovering BOOK.epub.lua file within the associated BOOK.sdr folder, you can try cgsecurity’s PhotoRec. Just start the program, chose SD disk, 'scan free space' and choose 'txt' file as the type of files you want to recover.

Look through the bunch of recovered text files with incrementally increased file size and check if they contain book titles.

I use lftp to mirror my books folder on Kobo SD card and the other day I forgot to put -R switch so the upload and download operations were messed up, which resulted in the exact same situation you mentioned, all latest annotations were gone. But I managed to recover the *.lua book info files by the method above.

Good luck!

[locus]

Originally Posted by abij

Hello,

I may not comment on whether turning on Kobo with empty SD slot will erase previously present annotations. But if you happen to use KOReader and if you'd like to try to recover annotations etc. through recovering BOOK.epub.lua file within the associated BOOK.sdr folder, you can try cgsecurity’s PhotoRec. Just start the program, chose SD disk, 'scan free space' and choose 'txt' file as the type of files you want to recover.

Look through the bunch of recovered text files with incrementally increased file size and check if they contain book titles.

I use lftp to mirror my books folder on Kobo SD card and the other day I forgot to put -R switch so the upload and download operations were messed up, which resulted in the exact same situation you mentioned, all latest annotations were gone. But I managed to recover the *.lua book info files by the method above.

Good luck!

Thank you mate. Unfortunately I'm just using Calibre, so I don't think your suggestion applies in my case.

I've just copied the sqlite database, I've found the bookmarks of the main storage, but not the annotations. Anybody knows where they are?

So many bugs with this Kobo :/

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by locus

Thank you mate. Unfortunately I'm just using Calibre, so I don't think your suggestion applies in my case.

I've just copied the sqlite database, I've found the bookmarks of the main storage, but not the annotations. Anybody knows where they are?

So many bugs with this Kobo :/

The bookmarks for book on the SD card are in exactly the same place as the bookmarks for the books in the main memory. They shouldn't disappear when you eject the card and reinsert it, and in my experience, they don't. I'll admit I haven't explicitly test this recently, but, I have done some other testing of annotations of books on the SD card, and I'm sure somewhere during that I ejected the card and didn't lose the annotations.

There only reasons I can think of for the annotations being removed is if the device thinks the books on the card changed, or it thinks the card change. In either of these cases, the device will wipe the book details from the internal database and import them as new books. As it sounds like you saw the importing progress bar, it sounds like this is what happened. And if all books changed, then it is most likely it thinks the card changed.

The device identifies the card from an ID. I think it is an id from the FAT32 partition. It is recorded against the books on the card and also in the config file. If you have a backup of the database from before this happened, it might be possible to recover things. It would be a matter of working out the ids, and changing them in the backup. The id in question is in the column "ExternalId" in the table "contents".

[locus]

Originally Posted by davidfor

The bookmarks for book on the SD card are in exactly the same place as the bookmarks for the books in the main memory. They shouldn't disappear when you eject the card and reinsert it, and in my experience, they don't. I'll admit I haven't explicitly test this recently, but, I have done some other testing of annotations of books on the SD card, and I'm sure somewhere during that I ejected the card and didn't lose the annotations.

There only reasons I can think of for the annotations being removed is if the device thinks the books on the card changed, or it thinks the card change. In either of these cases, the device will wipe the book details from the internal database and import them as new books. As it sounds like you saw the importing progress bar, it sounds like this is what happened. And if all books changed, then it is most likely it thinks the card changed.

The device identifies the card from an ID. I think it is an id from the FAT32 partition. It is recorded against the books on the card and also in the config file. If you have a backup of the database from before this happened, it might be possible to recover things. It would be a matter of working out the ids, and changing them in the backup. The id in question is in the column "ExternalId" in the table "contents".

Thank you very much for the explanation. I think I've lost all the data then.
I've just checked and only the no-sd card annotations are there.

I think I'll change my backup habits.

Thank you again.