Help! Cal duplicated everything into itself, now...frozen?

[dancingcrane]

My apologies, but I must have done something very wrong, and don't know how to proceed. Maybe I should just start all over, but I don't want to lose anything. Should I try deleting and reinstalling the app, the Calibre Library, both? I'm assuming the Calibre Library is just a copy of what's still on my computer in other locations, yes?

I'm running mac os 10.6.8. 2 gb memory (1 gb usually free), 160 gb hard disk (18 gb free). No space or memory problems, at least. This is the first time I've contacted you, and i'll be grateful for any help anyone can give.

Here's what happened:

i got calibre over a year ago now, and opened it. Not sure what I did, but it started duplicating into its Calibre Library every single document on my computer. Not only every book, but every other document of every kind of extension. Every message I composed since I got this computer, every "readmefirst.txt", changelog.txt and user's manual.rtf from every application I ever downloaded. Everything I can think of that isn't a picture file is now in Calibre Library, and the vast majority of it is labeled "unknown".

Add confusion to confusion. When I tried to use that version of Calibre, it said i had hundreds of thousands of books (most of them one paragraph story pieces or notes to myself in text documents), but I couldn't access a single one through the calibre app itself. I could open a finder window, go to Calibre Library in my home file, and open any number of "unknown" files and see familiar items, however.

I backed away slowly and hadn't touched Calibre for months till yesterday, when i updated to the most recent version, which I hoped would show me a way out of my problem. Calibre now tells me I have no books at all. The Calibre Library is unchanged, and still accessible through clicking in a finder window.

[ldolse]

Best just to start with the clean, empty library of your current Calibre install. Use a find duplicates program like Singlemizer to remove the dupes from the old library folder, unless you're 100% certain it's all duplicates - if so just delete the old library folder. Probably wise to double-check the new library folder is an empty folder as well.

The only way I can see that it would import every doc on the computer is if you did a bulk import with add books and told it to start scanning at the computer's root folder. Just don't do that again.. Check out the videos tutorials in the main forum sticky:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=118596

[dancingcrane]

Thank you, will do as you suggest!