Moving Calibre/ebooks to a new laptop

[SherryM]

First I apologize if this has already been addressed. I searched but couldn't find an answer. Here's my problem. I have an older laptop that I've kept just because I have my calibre files and kindle files on and just didn't have the time to get everything transferred over when I purchased a new laptop last year. So a couple of weeks ago my daughter-in-law needed to borrow a laptop and used my old one. Unfortunately, my 3 yr old grandson decided to take many of the keys off it when mom left the room. I'm sure you all can see where this is headed. I did not have it backed up. I decided last weekend to put everything on my newer laptop. I installed calibre but now I don't know/can't figure out how to get my ebooks into calibre on the newer laptop. Or my ebooks from Amazon (that are stored in a directory on my old laptop) now stored on my newer laptop. I really hope to get this all figured out because I hope to get a new kindle soon and then get my ebooks on it. I have many ebooks that are advanced review copies that were downloaded using bookfunnel that are not in my kindle directory that I want to move over to the new kindle. My current kindle is 6 years old. I hope all this makes sense cause it sure sounds like a mess.

Thank you all for you assistance!
Sherry

[theducks]

Take the Hard drive out of the old one and put it in a (USB) drive case or get a USB drive adapter (has connections for many old drive types) , now you can get at all the files from your new LT

[dwig]

Originally Posted by theducks

Take the Hard drive out of the old one and put it in a (USB) drive case or get a USB drive adapter (has connections for many old drive types) , now you can get at all the files from your new LT

+1, I've used one of these ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DQJME7Y...=229W6NR2EAZSL ) for similar tasks. They aren't "pretty" but are sort of a Swiss Army Knife universal tool. Getting a case is a good idea as well, but you have to first find out exactly what size and interface are needed to match the old notebook drive. A case has the advantage of making the old drive useful as a general purpose external drive, though cases can be hard to find for some of the older HD interfaces. The universal adapter has the advantage of working with a wide range of drives, even those with older interfaces, in future similar situations. Both require that the new notebook can read the old notebook's HD file format.

The OP fails to mention what OSs are involved, but it may also be possible to access the old machine's data over a network connection. This would require that both are connected to the same router or switch and file sharing is enabled. It may require, in this case, that an external keyboard be attached to the notebook with the "gelded" keyboard in order to make the appropriate changes in Settings/Control Panel/System Preferences.

If the old notebook isn't too ancient then using a USB connect drive, HDD or flash drive, would work, though also using an external keyboard as a "crutch" may be necessary.

[SherryM]

Thank you for your suggestions. I had several things pop up in my life that kept me from working on this problem. I got back to it last night and have now encountered another problem. I plugged my Kindle into my laptop and once it was recognized by Calibre I switched to the Calibre device view to see the books on the Kindle; highlighted my books; right-clicked and select the option to add them to my library. I received the error "could not download files from the device". Any suggestions as to what I need to do to fix this? The following is the details:

calibre, version 3.6.0
ERROR: Could not download files: Could not download files from the device

mtp:::"o10BC":::Internal storage/Android/data/com.amazon.kindle/files/Books/B0060M0D7M/B0060M0D7M_EBOK.prc
Failed to fetch the file (u'Internal storage', u'Android', u'data', u'com.amazon.kindle', u'files', u'Books', u'B0060M0D7M', u'B0060M0D7M_EBOK.prc') with error: Failed to read all data from file

mtp:::"o10BA":::Internal storage/Android/data/com.amazon.kindle/files/Books/B00DQEYUIU/B00DQEYUIU_EBOK.prc
Failed to fetch the file (u'Internal storage', u'Android', u'data', u'com.amazon.kindle', u'files', u'Books', u'B00DQEYUIU', u'B00DQEYUIU_EBOK.prc') with error: Failed to read all data from file

mtp:::"o19A0":::Internal storage/Documents/Winter Solstice - Pilcher, Rosamunde.mobi
Failed to fetch the file (u'Internal storage', u'Documents', u'Winter Solstice - Pilcher, Rosamunde.mobi') with error: Failed to read all data from file

[GlenBarrington]

So, there isn't a software solution for moving a database? As a retired DBA, I find that odd, that seems like something that should be do-able if you know where everything is stored. Is there documentation on that sort of thing? I'm thinking a simple backup script and a simple restore script should be relatively easy. Certainly with a Perl script!

[theducks]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

So, there isn't a software solution for moving a database? As a retired DBA, I find that odd, that seems like something that should be do-able if you know where everything is stored. Is there documentation on that sort of thing? I'm thinking a simple backup script and a simple restore script should be relatively easy. Certainly with a Perl script!

Calibre added the tool sometime in V2.x
It Exports spanned zips that contain All known Libraries, as well as the user configurations

Running the restore part gives you the option of what to restore (at your new location).

[PeterT]

You need to remember that the calibre backend storage is more than a SQL database; it's also the complete set of folders and files in the file system. Sure one could expprt the schema and contents of the SQL database and reload them on a different system but you'd be missing the rest of the calibre library.

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