Restoring Library from Saved Copy

[Snowgoat]

Sorry if this was already covered. I did search and read similar questions, but I wound up more confused.

I saved a copy of my Calibre library to my dropbox account last month (metadata and all) for safe keeping.

After having issues syncing my new Kindle Fire HD with with my Calibre the other day, a few of my books were deleted from my desktop Calibre library, metadata got messed up, and a few other issues. Instead of going through each and every book to see what happened, I was wondering if I can use that saved copy of my Calibre Library and restore to it?

Could I recopy that saved Calibre Library to my desktop and use that Library? Or will it not sync? I'm not sure which books were messed up disturbed the other day and I have an extensive library, so I'm hoping for an easier option.

[Adoby]

It will not sync. The updated metadata for the books are stored in the file metadata.db. And if you copy the old library over the current you will end up with the old metadata and possibly a lot of unmaintained duplicate books.

Copy over the old library, but rename the folder first. Or rename the folder with text existing library.

After that you have two libraries. One old but functional and one new but corrupt. If you need to sync them you have to do that by manually copying books between the libraries using Calibre. Don't try to copy or change books inside the Calibre library manually any other way. There lurks chaos and corruption.

[speakingtohe]

You should be able to copy your library from dropbox to a different location on your desktop (different directory) and it should sync with the dropbox copy.

Helen