Reconstruction of Calibre library from Kobo devices

[Charlotte-B]

First, apologies if this is covered elsewhere on the forum - I'm happy to delete it if so, but I couldn't find all the information I needed in one place, and I thought my situation might happen to others, so this might end up being useful to people besides me.

I had a very large library in Calibre, working fine for a while. Unfortunately my harddrive died, and I just found out that the backup I made won't work (reasons not relevant here - but I've learned a lesson I'll never forget!).

Basically, I have two Kobo Libra 2s, and I just need to restore everything from them back into Calibre on my laptop - crucially, including collections information, as well as other metadata (though I don't really care about reading position info.)

Because I've had a series of IT disasters over the last couple of days (some not my fault, but one or two definitely my fault ), I want to make completely sure that I don't accidentally wipe the devices (though I have backed all of the files and folders from each of them to my laptop).

Basically, what I need to do is ensure that Calibre/KTE is set to copy all metadata, incl. collections info (as well as the books themselves, of course), from the devices, rather than the other way around. (I've already added the necessary #collections column in Calibre). I think that this can be done via KoboTouchExtended, but the advice I can find doesn't exactly correspond with what's in the Calibre interface - which I'm thinking might be because it was written prior to some updates?

Anyway, if anyone could give me a simple list of instructions for this - or point me to one if it already exists - I'd be most grateful.

[Charlotte-B]

Thought I should just explain one thing a bit more fully.

I've seen suggestions online that getting series information from my device into Calibre might not be straightforward. Is it really just a case of selecting "Read metadata from files on device" in the KTE settings? Will that automatically copy the metadata, incl. series and collections, to Calibre (for books I copy into Calibre, obvs)?

My concern is that all of the other settings seem to presuppose the files are being copied in the other direction - e.g. "Save template to control the filename and location of files sent to the device". In other words, it all seems to be set up for transfer of data from Calibre to the device (which obviously makes sense in most situations). So, as I say, what I need to be sure of before plugging in and giving it a try is that ticking that one box - "Read metadata from files to device" - will ensure that nothing on my devices is "synced" in such a way that I lose data. As I mentioned before, I've backed up my devices, but, if, say, the series data is messed up somehow, I'm not sure how to retrieve it and re-apply it from the backup I've made, so I'm just being extra cautious about plugging my devices into the laptop.

Also, will KTE automatically convert the kepub files back into epubs when writing them to the device?

I hope that makes sense...