Need some help please - stuff is missing

[jayhjay]

I realized bits and pieces of my library are missing. Mostly it is covers - almost all the books are missing their cover preview (the one that shows up when you click on the book in Calibre, not in the actual ebook). When I go into the book file in Finder I see no image file for the books.

Also, a bunch of books say they have no available formats when I try to open them. There is nothing in their file location, just a cover in some cases, and a file that says metadata.opf. But the book itself seems to be gone. These seems to be confined to epub books but I didn't test every one to confirm.

I am guessing it is related to a recent move to a new library location (I moved the books to a dropbox folder). Presumably something got messed up along the way, although it could have predated that and I never noticed. I also downloaded some new calibre plug ins. Those are the only changes I can think recently.

Any suggestions for what might fix this? I know updating the covers is easy enough but before I go through and add them manually for all 250 books I thought there might be a simpler solution. And obviously I would rather not have to manually re-add all my books that are empty.

Any ideas what might have happened or how to fix it? Thanks!

[speakingtohe]

This has happened to me when I moved the library to another location. The covers were still there (in the books themselves and most were in file folders) but didn't show up in the gui. Not knowing what do do and having probably not much else to do that day, I just dragged the covers to the Gui. Maybe I could have just recopied a recent backup metadata.db file and done a library check, but this was an afterthought.

Helen

[kovidgoyal]

Putting calibre's library in a network location like dropbox or a network drive is dangerous. Bad things will happen if you accidentally leave copies of calibre running on the same library on different computers, for example. Or if you access the files directly while calibre is running on the library.

You have to be rather careful to ensure things dont break.

If your covers were from the book files, you can ask calibre to reread them for you automatically via the bulk metadata edit dialog.

[jayhjay]

Thanks so much. I don't think I have had calibre running on more than one computer, but I may have accessed dropbox from my phone while calibre was open on my computer at home. Would that have been an issue? And I have likely gone directly into files while calibre is running (I keep it open a lot but I will make an effort to close it when I am not using it). But I don't think that I have gone into nearly all those books that are now missing.

Is it possible things just got mixed up in the transfer to a new location (I had some similar problems when I moved from PC to Mac)? I guess either way, the real question is whether there is a way to get the content back for the book files that are missing without manually re-adding all the books. Any suggestions? Thanks!

[kovidgoyal]

Not automatically, no.

[jayhjay]

Ok, I guess I just need to go back through and re-add things. I guess my lesson learned is stop messing with a good thing! After this I will stop making changes and just enjoy!

I appreciate your help!

[blue_skies]

Originally Posted by jayhjay

I realized bits and pieces of my library are missing. Mostly it is covers - almost all the books are missing their cover preview (the one that shows up when you click on the book in Calibre, not in the actual ebook). When I go into the book file in Finder I see no image file for the books.

Also, a bunch of books say they have no available formats when I try to open them. There is nothing in their file location, just a cover in some cases, and a file that says metadata.opf. But the book itself seems to be gone. These seems to be confined to epub books but I didn't test every one to confirm.

I am guessing it is related to a recent move to a new library location (I moved the books to a dropbox folder).

I have been having this same problem. A while back, I read some posts suggesting it is easiest to keep the Calibre library backed up by changing the library location to the Dropbox folder. I do not access the Dropbox folder from any other computer or device. I moved the Calibre library there strictly so that it would be automatically backed up offsite.

I haven't had a problem until I recently had the exact same issue described in the post above. To resolve it, I went to preferences to change the location of the Calibre library back to the location in the Dropbox folder... and all of the covers were back and the books were able to be accessed normally.

Today, I used the Find "Authors" in the column on the left to look at a book for a particular author. After that, I wasn't sure how to get the normal library view back so I clicked the books icon and chose "Calibre Library"... and that recreated the above problem. To fix it, I had to change the location back to the Dropbox located library.

Now I find that I can switch back and forth between the two by choosing "quick switch" and clicking the only option listed "Calibre library" or by just clicking on "Calibre Library" in that same list under the books icon. Whichever group of books I'm looking at (the functional group with covers or the empty non-cover group) it switches to the other group.

The library grouping that has the covers and works properly also is the most correct as far as book changes I've made recently.

So I guess what I'm wondering is, why do I seem to have two of the same main libraries in different locations? I went to Preferences, ran the Calibre Welcome Wizard to switch the location, and when I open the wizard again, it still shows the dropbox folder for my calibre library and says it will use that location for my library.

Do I need to delete the old Calibre Library folder somewhere or change something else to prevent this problem?

[blue_skies]

I found an additional "Calibre Library" folder on the C drive under Users and My Name, but it only has 5 books in it, compared to 79 books in the functional up to date dropbox located library, and 91 in the library that doesn't work correctly.

[DoctorOhh]

Do any of these libraries have your books highlighted in yellow (see attached) above the tag browser?

[blue_skies]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

Do any of these libraries have your books highlighted in yellow (see attached) above the tag browser?

No, I don't have anything like that in either library display. Where you have Main Library (to the left of the yellow highlighted number of books) I just have a greyed-out "Restrict to" with "*current search" as the only drop down option. To the right of that, it just says: (all books).

[blue_skies]

I deleted the calibre library that was located in my User folder, which had empty book folders and an old .db. I then had somehow brought up a slightly different dialogue box than I've seen before and browsed to the dropbox location and clicked that the library had moved.

This time it seems to have worked as the "Calibre Library" doesn't show as an option under the books icon like it did previously... and I just have the correct functioning one.

I forgot to mention that I updated to the latest version earlier today, so that is likely why it created the empty library in the old location. A previous version must have created a those five book folders at some point, and put a copy of the database there, even though the library had already been moved.

I'm just happy to happy to have that curious problem resolved.