Calibre Library out of sync with Dropbox

[chilady1]

I have my Calibre library on Dropbox so I might have syncing across a laptop and desktop PC.

I noticed that the Calibre Library on my desktop shows 12,808 books, while the laptop shows 13,506. I know the cardinal rule of not having Calibre opened at the same time on both as that presents a conflict in Dropbox.

QUESTION: What might be the easiest way to get the library back in sync without having to add each individual book?

I don't really know how this happened (although I am sure I did something) - and it appears that the books I have added since 11/18/12 onto my laptop somehow didn't quite make it to my desktop. The desktop Calibre shows no books added since 11/17/12 and I have added a number of books (including my Fictionwise library) since then.

Any thoughts from my very wise and learned colleagues here at MobileRead? Thanks in advance and Happy Thanksgiving!

[cybmole]

why not just copy & paste the whole folder, & say no when Windows asks about duplicates???

[chaley]

Originally Posted by chilady1

I have my Calibre library on Dropbox so I might have syncing across a laptop and desktop PC.

I noticed that the Calibre Library on my desktop shows 12,808 books, while the laptop shows 13,506. I know the cardinal rule of not having Calibre opened at the same time on both as that presents a conflict in Dropbox.

QUESTION: What might be the easiest way to get the library back in sync without having to add each individual book?

I don't really know how this happened (although I am sure I did something) - and it appears that the books I have added since 11/18/12 onto my laptop somehow didn't quite make it to my desktop. The desktop Calibre shows no books added since 11/17/12 and I have added a number of books (including my Fictionwise library) since then.

Any thoughts from my very wise and learned colleagues here at MobileRead? Thanks in advance and Happy Thanksgiving!

If both computers are referring to the library in dropbox, then you have had a conflict on the metadata.db file. Because of this your two computers are seeing different databases. It also means that at some point calibre was running on both computers at the same time.

To fix this you need to determine which copy is correct and delete the other copies. From what you say, the copy on the laptop is correct, so you would delete all copies of metadata.db from the desktop. There will be at least two of them with slightly different names. Once you delete these, dropbox should resync and copy the db from your laptop to the desktop. Note that you will lose any changes made on your desktop machine since the conflict happened.

FWIW: it is extremely easy to break things when using dropbox. You must be *absolutely sure* that calibre is running on only one computer at a time, even if only one machine is used to make changes. If you run calibre on machine A then stop it, you must wait until dropbox has finished syncing before starting calibre on machine B. Finally, dropbox, calibre, and anti-virus programs sometimes have problems playing together. These problems manifest as dropbox conflicts or calibre database write errors.

[chilady1]

Thanks All! Really appreciate the help and Yes Chaley, I believe what happened is I was running two copies of Calibre although I try to be diligent and NOT do this because of the conflicts it creates.

I will delete the metadata file from the desktop and have Dropbox re-sync. THanks so much for the solution.