Missing Books in (original) Folder

[stumped]

Originally Posted by FinFan

4. Not sure I understand this one. My collection was stored on P:\Books\ . The library is on P:\Calibre.

..

P is not, perchance, a PCLOUD drive ?

the question is are there any cloud or sync processes that could be playing a hidden role

e.g. my own P drive was created by Pcloud as a virtual drive ( maybe I named it as P, but I think actually it defaulted to that. and its a virtual drive so it does not behave like a simple old fashioned drive that I put into the case myself

you would not have 50G+ in any cloud unless you were paying for it though

[FinFan]

Originally Posted by stumped

P is not, perchance, a PCLOUD drive ?

you would not have 50G+ in any cloud unless you were paying for it though

No, it isn't. It's an external storage device I have connected at all times. It's a 4TB drive and P: is just one partition. I assigned the letter myself.

And I don't have any cloud space whatsoever.

Mostlikely scennario as it stands now is I accidently deleted the folder myself. Accidently being the appropriate term as I have no recolecltion of doing it.

[Quoth]

You HAVE checked the drive integrity?
An external 4T drive isn't the most reliable thing.
Also some Win10 updates did strange things to some external storage.

[BetterRed]

@Finfan - I get the impression you have missed some calibre fundamentals: The primary point of control of a calibre library is its database, it gets built in memory when calibre starts from the metadata.db file in the library folder. The file system is only used as secondary (backing) storage. And the primary units of data in a calibre library are books, not files - i.e one adds, converts, edits, sends… and removes books.

Originally Posted by FinFan

I didn't take that long, an hour maybe. Give or take a couple minutes. I have my book folder and the library folder on the same drive. Maybe that helped and mabe that's the problem ?

An hour for 'thousands of books' seems rather quick to me, how many thousands?

Others responders may care to comment

Having originals and the library on the same drive wouldn't be a problem, there are probably millions of calibre users who have everything on single drive laptops.

Originally Posted by FinFan

I removed the files from calibre. Marked one, deleted it, checked that it was still there in the original folder. Which it was. Than I deleted more that I don't need in the programm itself. Whatever, I didn't delete all of them in any case. I still have many left in library which still are not available in the other.

Library folder 48.2 gb - my folder 80 mb. That can't be right in any case.

What software did you use to remove 'files' from the calibre library? From the above I am guessing Windows File Explorer or a similar 3rd party file management tool. That's not the way to remove 'books' from a calibre library, that's the way to corrupt a calibre library.

But, assuming you used File Explorer or similar, you would have had to navigate calibre's library\author\title tree, i.e. something like this:



Does that ring true?

If it doesn't, and the files you deleted were in a flat folder structure then, as you've already suggested, you were deleting the original files.

I guess you don't have a backup of your original "P:\Books" folder Ψ³

BR

[FinFan]

@Quoth

Not recently, no. Thanks for the reminder. I will do that later.

@BetterRed

Maybe I am missing the real purpose of calibre. Why did I delete files? I discovered that it let's you choose books to read by random. Since I didn't want to have books (comics, magazines or whatever I have collected) in there I already read, and making sure the org file will stay in the org folder....I deleted them from the library.

How did I do that ? I don't know why this seems to be so hard to understand. Click on any entry in the calibre list with the right mouse button. Choose "delete book" from the context menu (I have a German version not sure it is exactly labelled that in english) - è voila. It's gone. No magic, no 3rd party programms. And I did this first with an unimportant .txt file and made sure it was not deleted from the original source.

How many files did I add. I still have roughly 3000 listed in calibre and I deleted a lot from there. So my guess would be 3500 give and take 100. Sounds a lot ?
Those include books, comics, magazines, pdf and txt files of all kind collected from more than 10-15 years I'd say. At my best I read roughly a book a week plus I had a collection of scanned magazines dating way back. And that took about an hour to add, yes.

As it looks now it might be possible to get all this back. After scanning with EaseUS Data Recovery I think it found all the files (51.1 gb). Unfortunately the trial version doesn't allow you to recover them and right now I cant affort to buy a licence. I am looking for other program options right now.

And if I had a backup......yeah, stupid me. Since I saw I had now two folders with those files I thought this is my backup. Believe it or not I wanted to backup the files to my second computer this morning. Which is where I discovered they are gone.

Again, if I deleted my folder by accident I can't remember how or why. Logically I must have done it as it is the only explanation. But I don't remember.

[BetterRed]

Ah-ha, lost in translation - if you had written "delete book" at the start I would have understood you were doing it with calibre, but the repeated use of "delete file" made me think file manager. First time calibre users often add, change, and delete items from a calibre library with their file manager and then wonder why things go wrong.

You could try the Recuva, if you don't want to buy the other one, I think its still free. May not be as good though.

BR

[FinFan]

Book, file - yes I think there is a difference. Sorry about that.

Tried Recuva - not only didn't it find any of those specific files, it didn't find a file at all !

It is now pretty certain this was not a fault of the calibre software but some idiocy of my own. I appreciate all the help from here that made my realise that.

I guess I have to accept my losses and move on.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by FinFan

It is now pretty certain this was not a fault of the calibre software but some idiocy of my own. I appreciate all the help from here that made my realise that.

I guess I have to accept my losses and move on.

Anyone can make stupid mistakes and most do, at one time or another. That's why one should always keep backups of one's important stuff, and in more places than one. Cloud storage, external drives (certainly more than just one, as drives can and do fail), whatever else you can think of.

[FinFan]

I am usually very meticulous about those things. Well, I guess that's why it's called a mistake. And I allready backed up all what's left. In the end I lost about 300-350mb which doesn't sound much but the majority of files were around 1-2mb.
There is some silver lining as most of the files lost were books or magazines I already read.

[alex197509]

Something similar happened to me. I got the portable recuva. Try it. It's free.