Dropbox full - duplicates?

[Deljah]

Hi,

I've imported about 40% of my kindle books into calibre. My calibre library folder is also my Dropbox folder. My Dropbox is already over half full. At this rate, it will not contain my entire library. I have about 4,300 kindle books of varying length/size.

Questions:

As I understand it, calibre creates copies of the books in the calibre library folder. Does this mean there are duplicates in my dropbox, and they are causing it to fill rapidly? How could this be fixed?

I see numerous unnamed files in the dropbox folder, along with subfolders by author names. Do the folders have to be arranged by author name?

I ask these questions b/c dropbox is constantly mentioned in the same breath as calibre, almost as if they must be used together. I do want to back up my kindle books in some manner.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[itimpi]

Using Dropbox with Calibre is certainly not mandated, but many people find it convenient. You do, however, need to be aware of the space your library will use and the space you have available on your Dropbox account when using this approach. This may make Dropbox impractical for those with very large ebook libraries (mine for example is about 40GB and thus too large for my Dropbox account).

The calibre library in Dropbox will contain copies of all the books you have added to Calibre. If you also have copies in your Dropbox folder outside the Calibre library then these can be removed from Dropbox to avoid duplication.

I am assuming that you have not put the Calibre library at the top level of the Dropbox folder as that would get messy? I would expect the Calibre library to be in a folder of its own (e.g. "My calibre Library"). Everything inside that folder is then under the control of Calibre and should not be manipulated outside Calibre. There will be additional files for purposes of metadata, cover, etc but you should not need to worry about these.

[Deljah]

In dropbox, the books are organized into folders by author name. Is that how everyone else's appears?

I went into dropbox and deleted the files that were not in folders by author name (except the main metadata file). This deletion freed up a lot of space, but will I have to do this manually every time a book is added to calibre? I am not sure how to add something to my calibre library w/o a copy being automatically created. Since dropbox is backing up the library, it's pulling in the copies too. Is there anyway to avoid all this?

Thank you!

[itimpi]

From your description it sound as if you have set the main Dropbox folder as the Calibre library. This is going to make it very difficult to manage your Dropbox space, so you want to tidy things up.

If you use the option within Calibre to move the library to a new folder (create an appropriate empty folder under Dropbox first), then Calibre will move all the files that it believes are part of its library to the new location. What is left behind are files that are candidates for deletion.

[Deljah]

I will give this a shot. Will let you know how it goes. Thanks!