How do you back up your books?

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by animedude01

What happens if they go out of business, decide (or are forced) to drop a publisher, or lose their records for some reason? You could be out of luck trying to re-download it. It's a good idea to back up all your downloads and not rely on the vendor. An example would be Fictionwise stating on their FAQ that they can't guarantee that your books will remain in your bookshelf forever. Don't take a change, download them all, then back them up.

Sure... it could happen. But, they would have to become unavailable and you would have to have data loss.

I'm not saying don't back up.... I'm just saying it probably won't be catastrophic. (I back up locally and online). Also, I assume someone that has over 800 books probably has a pretty heavy public domain/free ebooks library (or has been reading ebooks for a long time) which are readily available on the net.

BOb

[Nakor]

Because Calibre doesn't conform to my particular narrow-minded concept of organization () I tend to do it entirely by hand. I just have all of them in a folder, organized into subfolders the exact way I want them to be sorted on my Libre, and then keep a copy of that folder on my HDD, an external flash drive, and of course on my Libre's SD card.

[ChrisC333]

I have a very simple system.

It's mostly based on a) having lots of books now and b) not actually caring as much as I used to.


In theory, I back up my computer once a week using Time Machine, and stick the second drive back in the safe. This covers most eventualities.


But the real beauty of it is that at my age I no longer expect to remember exactly which books I owned anyway. And I'm not really bothered if the occasional one goes missing.

I was talking to an older friend recently and said:

"Please stop me if I've told you this anecdote before"

To which he replied:

"Carry on. It doesn't matter - I won't remember it if you have...."

It getting that way with the books I read too. I can re-read the old favourites every couple of years and they'll seem partly familiar yet still fresh.... So it's become a case of Back-up, Shmack-up - does it really matter that much?

Thanks to full bookshelves, a reasonable computer system, and the wonders of encroaching senility I'll never run out of things to read and re-read. If I unknowingly ended up buying the same thing twice it's not a big deal. Let the young control freaks fret about keeping all their possessions in perfectly precise piles at their fingertips - I've abandoned the pretence that I know where everything is around here anyway.

That reminds me - today is Sunday. If I can just recall the combination to the safe I'll do that back up..... maybe soonish....

[Sweetpea]

I keep the original book, the de-drm'd book, if it was a drm'd book, the source in HTML, and the generated epub, mobi and pdf books (from those source HTML). They are in two locations, my file server and my external HD.

On the readers: my JE100 and Loox720 both have all mobipocket books (de-drm'd), my Mini has the epubs, mobipocket (de-drm'd) and pdf books.

First off there are always at least three, and sometimes more separate copies of each book on my main computer. If I have purchased a ebook from Sony, Amazon, etc. the original in what ever format is in the original download folder. A copy of every file from whatever source is in a directory organized into fiction and non-fiction with sub-directories for each author. Here is a copy of the original file from whatever source, a copy with DRM stripped (if applicable), and a file converted to epub (if original format was other). All the epub format files here are than duplicated again in my Calibre folder. My main computer is set up with RAID 1 so that I have enough confidence in my data integrity that I figure a once a week backup to an external USB hard drive is good enough.

I don't trust the cloud services to be reliable and always available to be willing to pay for one, and the free services do not provide enough space.

[Terisa de morgan]

Well, I don't use calibre to manage my library. I have a folder structure I like, an access file where I keep all the info I care about my books and, for every book I have a rar file which contains: a directory with html/opf necessary to recreate it, a lit copy, a prc copy and an epub copy. If I've purchased the book, I keep too the original book with DRM and the original book without DRM (without my modifications). I keep all these files in two hard-disks I synchronize daily and in an USB stick I synchronize weekly.

[Dellaster]

Everything's in my Calibre folder and I only have ebooks I've actually read or intend to read in the near future, so it's still less than 500 MB. I chose to use SugarSync's 2 GB free account since I could just point it at my existing Calibre folder and forget it. Works for me.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by ChrisC333

In theory, I back up my computer once a week using Time Machine, and stick the second drive back in the safe. This covers most eventualities.

Are you talking about OS X "Time Machine"? If so, that actually runs every HOUR... copying anything that changed on your Mac to the Time Machine external drive.

BOb

[TallMomof2]

1. Remove the DRM
2. Load into Calibre.
3. PC is automatically backed up every night to my Windows Home Server with duplication turned on. (All the home PCs are backed up this way.)
4. Calibre folder is in my Dropbox folder.
5. PC is backed up to Carbonite.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by TallMomof2

1. Remove the DRM
2. Load into Calibre.
3. PC is automatically backed up every night to my Windows Home Server with duplication turned on. (All the home PCs are backed up this way.)
4. Calibre folder is in my Dropbox folder.
5. PC is backed up to Carbonite.

I bow down to your backup superiority!

Why don't you back up your Windows Home Server to the cloud rather than the PC?

BOb

[JohnN]

1. Originals are stored on a USB drive and on the cloud via CrashPlan

2. I deDRM a copy, and convert to epub - for personal use only, and store these on Dropbox


(Hi all, I'm John and I'm new)
J

[ChrisC333]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Are you talking about OS X "Time Machine"? If so, that actually runs every HOUR... copying anything that changed on your Mac to the Time Machine external drive.

BOb

It only backs up every hour if the drive is connected.


The drawback to leaving a backup drive permanently connected is that you risk losing the whole lot in the case of theft or fire. When I first started working with computers around 25 years ago the first data loss I ever experienced was due to theft not drive failure. Fortunately I had drilled into the company the need to back up their data and keep the copy in the safe - which they been doing. Theft of computers/laptops from homes and businesses is actually pretty common now, plus external back-up drives are a perfect small item to slip into a thief's pocket or backpack.

I've found it a lot easier to get back-up drills established in businesses than in a home situation. At home most people mean to get a routine going but rarely stick to it. It's not so much the fine detail of the plan that's important as whether they actually DO it or not.

Once a week works best for me because I know that - in reality - I won't keep disconnecting and re-connecting it every time I leave the house. The stuff that gets added in between is mostly not irreplaceable and could be re-entered if necessary. If there is anything vital in between I stick it on a thumb-drive or email it to myself, where it stays on the server for a week.

Cheers,

Chris

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by ChrisC333

It only backs up every hour if the drive is connected.

Well, you got me there.

Originally Posted by ChrisC333

The drawback to leaving a backup drive permanently connected is that you risk losing the whole lot in the case of theft or fire.

Of course, that is why I use a two layer backup system. Time Machine is for data loss (even accidental deletion) due to system failure.

Backing up to the cloud protects against catastrophic loss (theft, fire, etc.) where both the Mac drive and the Time Machine drive are lost.

(Actually I have another layer, I do a full drive backup with SuperDuper every now and then which is a mirror of my system drive that I could boot from and work off of until I get a change to rebuild the system using the more up to date Time Machine drive.)

BOb

[fugazied]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

I use DropBox and a USB drive and a CD archive.

Dropbox is awesome, I need to use it more.

Personally, I remove the DRM and save it to my mac (which is backed up automatically by Time Machine). In addition I have a script which uploads copies to the Amazon S3 cloud and I have copies on a PC in the house as well.

Ideally you want copies of your books in the cloud somewhere, because the worst case scenario is having your house burn down or every computer in your house stolen. In that scenario all local backups are gone and that's why you need remote as well as local.

[ChrisC333]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Of course, that is why I use a two layer backup system. Time Machine is for data loss (even accidental deletion) due to system failure.

Backing up to the cloud protects against catastrophic loss (theft, fire, etc.) where both the Mac drive and the Time Machine drive are lost.

(Actually I have another layer, I do a full drive backup with SuperDuper every now and then which is a mirror of my system drive that I could boot from and work off of until I get a change to rebuild the system using the more up to date Time Machine drive.)

BOb

It sounds like you've got all the bases very well covered there Bob.


Over the years I used a variety of backup systems, all of which worked well enough at the time. But in the event I had a pretty good run anyway. A few problems here and there but only one complete hard drive crash where the data couldn't be retrieved off it using fairly simple methods.

Now that I'm retired though, I've come to the liberating conclusion that almost nothing currently on any of the computers is irreplaceable, or would even be that much of a loss. Even reinstalling all the programs from scratch isn't a problem once time isn't so pressing. So a very simple system is plenty.