Calibre > Dropbox > iPad Mini > Calibre Companion: can't get it to work

[julesmck]

Hi, my sincere apologies if my question has been asked and answered before; I searched and could not find an exact description of my problem, which is being unable to access a Calibre library that was exported to Dropbox from an iPad Mini.

I'm a Calibre neophyte and here's my setup: my Calibre library is on a PC laptop, which is the 'ereader' I use to read my epubs in Calibre. I just inherited an iPad Mini and would like to read my Calibre library (the entire thing; not just a few select books) on the iPad. Is that possible?

I exported my library to Dropbox (Calibre > Export/import all Calibre data > Export all your Calibre data > Dropbox). However, when I log into Dropbox to see what got exported, no metadata.db file exists. The only things exported to the Dropbox folder are two files: part-0001.calibre-data and part-0002.calibre-data (each are 1 GB in size). Does anyone know why the metadata.db file wouldn't have been exported to Dropbox?

I installed Calibre Companion on the iPad and tried to point it to Dropbox but got an error message saying no database existed, so I manually copied the metadata.db file from the PC to Dropbox. That seemed to help, insofar as Calibre Companion started downloading something and a bunch of book titles and authors appeared, but when I tried to download one of the books, I got an error message saying "Error downloading book. Couldn't download the book file."

I thought PC (Calibre) > Cloud (Dropbox) > iPad (Calibre Companion) was the correct workflow but I'm obviously doing something wrong. I tried to do something similar on the iPhone with the same results, only there the book covers showed up. Still, when I clicked on Read to read one of the books, nothing happened. It's as if the book cover was just a .jpg and wasn't connected to the book itself, if that makes any sense.

Any ideas appreciated. Thank you very much for your time.

[stumped]

instead of export, copy the library to dropbox, then set up and use a sync program to keep it up to date.
works for me. i use free File Sync - Mirror option
i don't use " export", that is part of a backup/restore function, a simple copy of the entire folder, will work

[julesmck]

Thank you. I did as you suggested and copied the book and metadata.db files to Dropbox, but the same thing happened: I got the "Error downloading book. Couldn't download the book file" error when I tried to download any book.

[stumped]

Did you copy the entire library folder and all subfolders
If so, how.
You have to copy into your local Dropbox folder then let Dropbox sync it.that will take a while if it is a large library or a slow connection. Wait for it to fully sync. It has to be a complete clone of source library, with all subfolders in same organisation.
Folder uploads via browser to dropbox.com are broken/ not supported. Dropbox blame browsers and have no plans to fix.
What do you see if you vsually compare what is in dropbox with what is in the source folder. Of or compare folder properties. The counts of files and subflowers folders should match so should the size