many libraries

[yavannildi]

Yes I know! Not necessary but it happened. First time i used calibre i tried to put a few hundred books in the library. I ended up with unknown author and unkonw title. So I decided to start another library but I messed up. Long story short, how can I manage various books at once. I backed up some of my libraries (yes, i've 6) and lost the metadata. anyway i can recuperate it? by the way, sorry that i misused this fine software.

[Adoby]

If you lost the metadata then it is lost. And you can't recover it.

If you are wrong, and you actually didn't lose the metadata then you can recover it. But you may not realize this or know how to do it. And the information you have given is not enough to give advice.

If the metadata (the data about the data) really is lost then you still, most likely, have the data. The books themselves can be used to recreate the metadata. Open a book file and look for the title and the author(s) or even ISBN and use that as metadata for the book. That small amount of metadata may be enough to have calibre download a lot more metadata.

Also calibre has some helpful functions and plugins to help you in the job of finding metadata inside the book files. For instance it may be possible to have calibre to automatically look for ISBN-codes inside the book. (May not work correctly for all books/formats. If you convert to, for instance, epub first it may work better.) And you can have calibre use the information about ISBN to fetch detailed metadata from the internet.

The trick to manage many books is to first learn to manage one book. And then to do it to each book in turn. Figure out title and author or ISBN. Download additional metadata. Fix covers. Normalize series information. Normalize tags. Figure out how to group or classify the book(s). Separate books based on genre, type or perhaps even based on Dewey decimal classification. Remove, rename or merge duplicates. Split or merge articles, essays, short stories and anthologies. Convert formats. And so on.

It is important to get the order of things to do right. Otherwise you may fix a lot of stuff, only to have a metadata download delete or scramble everything. If you download metadata, do it early on. Or VERY carefully restrict what a metadata download may update.

Sometimes it may be possible to manage/change/update several books as a group. In "bulk". That is much faster than handling just one book at a time. But that is only for advanced and either very rash and brave users of calibre, or yellow cowardly users with several fresh backups of their libraries. I'm a very yellow coward myself, in this context. I have my computer setup so that it backup (snapshot) all my calibre libraries every time I exit caibre.

I would suggest that you first get author and title or ISBN right. Then have calibre try to download more metadata. Check and fix that ńew metadata. When a book is perfect move it to a calibre library where all books also are perfect. Otherwise continue working on the book or move it to a "fix-it-later" calibre library.

Many calibre users (like me) have a small "incoming" library where they fix metadata and other stuff on a small amount/group of books. Perhaps one author at a time. Or one series. Then they copy the books and their updated metadata to their final pristine calibre libraries based on typ or genre.