Is Google Drive OK for Calibre libraries now?

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by theducks

No
Google tampers with the file name (it adds a revision), which is devastating to the DB linkage

I don't know how others upload but you can always just not upload the db. rclone, for instance, has an --exclude flag.

If you are talking abut the file name, I have thousands of files in gdrive and none of them have filename changes.

EDIT: I did some further reading on it. I'm not sure how people are mounting their gdrives but take a look at rclone. It can mount google drives and I've been pretty happy with it. I'm almost positive this is no longer a concern.

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by apa64

However, it's best to at least pause the Drive syncing before starting Calibre and managing the library. The Drive sync can't keep up if you make changes to book metadata and cause file/folder name changes. You WILL get "unsyncable file" errors from Drive. When I got these (before I understood that I have to pause sync) I recovered by shutting down Drive and restarting it only after closing Calibre.

So to reiterate earlier posts in the thread: If you want to use Google Drive and want to be sure that there's no risk of lost or corrupted data, keep the Calibre Library in a folder that's not in Google Drive and use some other tool to sync with the Drive folder after closing Calibre. If you don't mind that you'll probably have to reimport or fix a book manually at some point (or worst case, corrupt the whole library), AT LEAST pause the sync before using Calibre.

And thanks for the thread, good information and warnings here.

I dunno if it is within the technical ability of the readers here but you can always look into unionfs type solutions so that calibre will write to the local drive, not gdrive and you can sync your changes later. I haven't tested but I will and it should work seamlessly. Just a thought.

[sun_reads]

This is a workaround that I've found. This is, by no means, any official thing and I recommend you use it at your own risk.
I have, in fact, suffered data loss from using Google Drive, though I've managed to fix it (one of my devices was offline and the library intact there).

Do not ever have multiple copies of your GDrive running when your library is updating to prevent corruption.

1. Turn sync off your PC.
2. Do whatever you want with your library.
3. Turn off sync on every other device you own, or turn off their internet.
4. Turn on sync on your PC.
5. When the update is finished, turn off sync on your PC again.
6. Sync every other location one by one, while every other device's sync turned off.

Since I only have two devices where I sync my books library (desktop and laptop) this is not a problem for me, since I always update in bulk.

Once again, I'm reiterating, use this at your own risk. I'm using it with a full knowledge of the possibility of data loss and my own responsibility is only for my data loss.

Also, I run out of space on dropbox.

[sealbeater]

On a sidenote, I've just started my experiements with Google drive using rclone. I've set up the mounts the same way I set up the others...I'm doing the unionfs route, so I'll have a local dir, a cloud dir and a unified dir that calibre will read and write to. All writes will be stored locally until uploaded to the cloud and all cloud resources will be available to the unified dir. I'll let you know if I run into any issues.

[dsch85]

Hello guys,
I decided to share my findings as the may be useful to the community.
I have a very large Calibre library and use Linux, Windows and Android. I needed a way to be able to access and manage my library from all those platforms without losing time copying files manually. I have a habit when I finish reading a book to rate it in the library, optimize tags and writing short reviews. Therefore, there are daily changes
Using a cloud service is the only way to go. Out of all cloud services, Google Drive is the worst and Dropbox is the best.
Google Drive constantly breaks the library and there is native client for Linux, OneDrive breaks it sometimes and again there's no native client for Linux. Dropbox never breaks the library and has a native client for Linux. It is also supported by the Calibre-go app, which I use on Android. So enough with the good stuff, Dropbox offers only 2GB of storage for free so no serious library will fit there. The paid plans are pointlessly expensive, so for now, I use MEGA cloud. It allows 50GB of free storage, it works perfectly with Calibre and it has native clients for most platforms. Unfortunately, no Android app supports MEGA.
I hope that's helpful.

[stumped]

Dropbox has a generous refer a friend and sometimes other bonuses so you can get up to 15gb free, eventually.
Amazon drive gives you 10gb if you are a prime member.
If you put everything into one obscure cloud solution with over generous free limits, they could go bust at any time.
Another option is to split your library across the ones
least likely to go out of business, though any one of them can change tos at any time. Amazon dropped their unimited deal, Microsoft drastically cut back their free one drive tier....
Mega could shut down at any time... And it has had lots of problems already. Many reports of users being unable to access it due to outages, also the ability to download your own files is volume limited, unless you pay. My son had a 20gb video file at mega, a movie he had made in hi Def. luckily we had zipped it into small chunks- before uploading it . But it took over a week to retreive all the chunks for free
because of mega download limits and then it was corrupt when reassembled. We don't know if their encryption corrupted it or if it was our fault but it was a huge waste of effort putting it there then not getting it back ok.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by stumped

Dropbox has a generous refer a friend and sometimes other bonuses so you can get up to 15gb free, eventually.

Over time they have had various extras, I currently have earned 20.75 GB of space on my 2 GB free Dropbox account for a total of 22.75 GB. My calibre library is about 16.25 GB so I still have room for expansion.

2 GB base free account
15 GB of referral
1 GB for linking with the mailbox app
3 GB for allowing camera uploads
.75 GB for simple tasks (twitter, Getting Started etc...)
1 GB Unaccounted for (can't remember what hoop I jumped through)

Originally Posted by stumped

If you put everything into one obscure cloud solution with over generous free limits, they could go bust at any time.

I had 975 GB for free on cloud.com, it was fun while it lasted.

Anything I have in the cloud is a backup of something I have stored locally somewhere.

Mega now has a windows app to easily sync or download large or small files to their cloud.

[stumped]

the 3gb for allowing camera uploads was a sweet deal - I uploaded about 3 pictures to get it
and you used to get the 1st extra 500Gb for adding one file or for reading the user guide.

I also use the "cloud is a backup for something local" approach,. and every so often I copy C:/dropbox to somewhere else if I am feeling particularly paranoid

i think box, not to be confused with dropbox was another one that went bust. and sugarsync closed its free tier.

i had a free spare 10gb in pcloud, dunno if they are still in business...

[dsch85]

I am actually using a workaround... It is not the best of solutions but it works.
I set up Calibre on both Windows and Linux to use a local folder that is synced at the MEGA cloud.
This way I can make changes on Windows and Linux and be sure they will be appropriately synced between them.
Now the only issues as I said in my previous post is using the library on Android. Calibre-go, which I believe is the best Calibre companion app on Andriod, supports connections to Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive. Promotions aside, the free plans are as follows:
2GB @Dropbox
5GB @OneDrive
15GB @Google Drive
But since syncing Calibre at Google Drive directly does not work well, if found this workaround.
On Windows, I use a freeware called DSychronize. It allows real-time synchronization between two folders, so I sync the local/MEGA folder to local/Google Drive folder, then Google Backup and Sync syncs it online and it works!. I guess Google Drive's problem is only with two-way sync? I don't know, but this works.
On Linux, I do the same with another freeware called FreeFileSync.
I also use iLovePDF to compress my PDFs and until my library becomes larger than 15GB, I will be OK.

[Sirtel]

My data has exceeded the limits of any free storage for a long while now. For my Calibre library (over 30 GB), photos and documents I use Dropbox (1 TB, 10€ per month). There's just nothing better for my needs. For my e-mail I use the 100 GB Google Drive plan (2€ per month), because my mailbox is about 40 GB by now (I don't delete old messages, there have been many occasions I needed to look up something from the past). I tried the OneDrive free plan a few years ago, but as was said in a previous post, OneDrive doesn't play nice with Calibre. I've also tried SugarSync, but they're more expensive than Dropbox, so no point really.

I've tried some of the more obscure clouds as well (Copy, Box etc), but never relied solely on those and all of them have gone out of business by now.

And of course I keep local back-up copies too, on external drives.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by stumped

i think box, not to be confused with dropbox was another one that went bust.

Not only is Box still going strong, I have 50 GB in my personal account and unlimited space in my university work account.

[stumped]

Originally Posted by DoctorOhh

Not only is Box still going strong, I have 50 GB in my personal account and unlimited space in my university work account.

must trade in my old memory for a more reliable one

pretty sure there have been other cloud service closures though.

virginmedia shut their free cloud a while ago ( it was rubbish anyway and was only for their oen customers so no great loss.) they shut down free personal web pages at the same time and a bunch of other perks used to attract new customers
plex have given up on cloud and shut down their plex cloud set up , upsetting lots of plex pass customers who only bought plex pass for that feature.

"Update – September 2018: We’ve made the difficult decision to shut down the Plex Cloud service on November 30th, 2018. As you may know, we haven’t allowed any new Plex Cloud servers since February of this year, and since then we’ve been actively working on ways to address various issues while keeping costs under control. We hold ourselves to a high standard, and unfortunately, after a lot of investigation and thought, we haven’t found a solution capable of delivering a truly first class Plex experience to Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost. While we are super bummed about the impact this will have on our happy Cloud users, ending support for it will allow us to focus on improving core functionality, adding new features and content, and delivering on our mission to provide a world-class product that we can all rely on and enjoy"

[Pinkie]

I can't get the Cloud, any of them, to work seamlessly for me. Just can't, so don't even. I've had so many problems, and it takes so damn long to do anything (and we have superfast broadband, but the free accounts are throttled at source) that I've given up.
I use my Kindle Fire for most of my reading, and I've installed Google Play on it with the simple hack. But Calibre Companion on the Kindle Fire has severe problems connecting wirelessly with the main Calibre library, and so I've given up using CC. It's fine on my Android phone, but because it's so bad on the Fire, there's not much point using it (I blame the Fire rather than the CC app, but the result is the same). If there was a way for CC to see and read files loaded on to the Kindle Fire by cable using Calibre, that might be an answer, but still... for now I use Moon+ Reader as my library.
Like most mortals, I only have 2gb on Dropbox, and the extra space is really expensive, so I just use Dropbox to sync. I have my Calibre Library backed up on gmail, as well as local storage, but I don't use it to sync wirelessly as that doesn't work. The library is huge, so no free storage can cope with all of it.
I used to use Mega, but it was once owned by Kimdotcom, who is currently in prison in Australia, so I've discontinued it. I just don't trust it.
So that's where I am currently, hooking my devices up to the main Calibre device by cable. If I use my other devices (I have laptops for travel) I use my local copy of Calibre Library, which is on a portable hard drive. It's not ideal, and it's not slick but at least it works, and I have reliable copies of my precious books.
I'd love to have an Android library app like CC which can read the books in the main Books file of the device however they got on to it, but I haven't found one yet.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Pinkie

I used to use Mega, but it was once owned by Kimdotcom, who is currently in prison in Australia, so I've discontinued it. I just don't trust it.

Nonsense he's still holed up in Queenstown in New Zealand, AFAIK he's never been to Australia, and if he did he probably never committed a crime here. Aussie Border Force might send him back to NZ as an undesirable alien.

[16th Oct 2018] Kim Dotcom offers message of support to 'rogue' National Party MP ...

BR

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Nonsense he's still holed up in Queenstown in New Zealand, AFAIK he's never been to Australia, and if he did he probably never committed a crime here. Aussie Border Force might send him back to NZ as an undesirable alien.

[16th Oct 2018] Kim Dotcom offers message of support to 'rogue' National Party MP ...

BR

Dotcom's in Queenstown? Huh, I thought he was still in Auckland somewhere. The original referent yet another case of someone unable to tell the difference between the 2 sides of the Tasman, clearly.