If I remove a book from my Kobo Aura One, will my annotations be spared?

[Epämääräinen]

If I remove a book from my Kobo Aura One, will my annotations be indefinitely spared, so that if I download the book onto my Kobo, they'll still be there? I tried quickly deleting a book and downloading it again, and at least then, the annotations were there, but is there a limit to how long or how many of them they get spared?

[johnnyb]

They should remain in the database until it is completely bloated and your device crashes and you have to reset it. That's at least what it used to be in my experience...

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Epämääräinen

If I remove a book from my Kobo Aura One, will my annotations be indefinitely spared, so that if I download the book onto my Kobo, they'll still be there? I tried quickly deleting a book and downloading it again, and at least then, the annotations were there, but is there a limit to how long or how many of them they get spared?

The answer to that is, yes, no and maybe. It depends on what you meant by "download" and "delete". The latter is a problem as the device has "Remove" on the menu and then different actions based on whether the book is sideloaded or purchased and where you are at the time. And while "download" on the device is referring to purchased books, I have seen it used to refer to sideloading just enough to make me question what you mean. So, because of that, I'll cover all the combinations I can think for.

Firstly, purchased books.

Annotations on purchased books are stored in the database. They get synced to the Kobo server and can sync to other Kobo devices or apps.

If you choose "Remove" on the book menu, you will have two options, "Remove download" and "Remove from My Books". The first removes the copy of the book from the device, but keeps information about the book on the device. You can later download it. The second option removes the book from the device and database and moves the book to the "Archive" section of your library. If you have another device or Kobo app, the book will be removed from there when they sync.

For the annotations, both versions of remove will remove the annotations from the database. But, the "Remove download" leaves the annotations on the server. If you download the book again, the annotations will be downloaded with it. With the "Remove from My Books", the annotations are completely removed and won't be recovered if your restore the book from the archive.

For books on the server, to the best of my knowledge, the annotations will stay on the server as long as you own the book. The oldest I can see is from 2014. That must have been synced a lot of times over the years.

For sideloaded books, "Remove" only has the one option and removes the book and nearly all evidence of it from the database. This includes the annotations. The only thing left is some entries in the "Event" table that are used for calculating things like the reading stats.

There is a complication. For sideloaded epubs and PDFs, the annotations are stored in two places. One is the database, the other is a file under the "Digital Editions" directory. This file is read each time you open the book and merged with those in the database. But, this file isn't deleted when the book is deleted. That means if you delete a sideloaded book and replace it later and used exactly the same file name, when you open the book, the annotations are read from the file and loaded into the database.

For sideloaded kepubs, the annotations are only in the database and will be removed when the book is. For other formats, they will be in the database and removed, but, I don't know if they are also in a file. If the RMSDK is used to render them, then I'd expect that the file would be created.

For completeness, there are two other ways that I can think of to remove a sideloaded book from the device. Firstly, if you delete the books file when the device is connected to a PC, the device will delete the book from the database when it is disconnected. This does the same thing as deleting the book using the UI. The other way is from calibre. It emulates the device and will remove it from the database in the same way. Both mean that the annotations will be removed from the database, but, the annotations file will still be there if you sideload the book again.

I think that covers everything. Probably a lot more than what you wanted to know, but, hopefully it will help someone at some point.