Rsync failure, Database repair, missing books

[laird]

I use an rsync job to keep my laptop and home machine in sync. I think I probably had a network failure while syncing and now I see that my calibre library is missing some books.

I performed a database restore and had lots of warnings like this:

/Users/laird/Calibre_Library/Charles Stross/Down on the Farm (Laundry Files) (4138) with error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages/calibre/library/restore.py", line 245, in restore_books
File "site-packages/calibre/library/restore.py", line 259, in restore_book
File "site-packages/calibre/library/database2.py", line 3332, in create_book_entry
File "site-packages/calibre/library/sqlite.py", line 313, in run
IntegrityError: PRIMARY KEY must be unique

Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Thanks,

Alan

[kovidgoyal]

You've got a mixture of different books with the same db id in your library folder. There's no way to restore them automatically,. You will have to move them from the library folder and re-add them by hand. You can use the recursive adding options to add them in bulk.

[laird]

This is an interesting problem. It seems like it would be pretty messy if I copied the Calibre_Library folder and imported it again. Hopefully we would not import the duplicates but since the import no longer has the metadata, I'm expecting lots of duplicates with poor matching.

What would happen on a database restore if I had first edited all the metadata.opf files to have unique values here:
<dc:identifier opf:scheme="calibre" id="calibre_id">2663</dc:identifier>

Is this the only place in the metadata where a database id would collide?

Thanks,

Alan

[kovidgoyal]

The import will read the metadata from the opf files. You can of course edit the ids by hand and then run a restore, but that's much more work.