Batch Author Select Screw Up

[Micron]

I must be a Calibre Cretin. How is it that I can select about 20 books where the author is FirstName-Series-Last
and click Edit Metadata on the toolbar
and choose to edit as a batch
and correct the author name and click OK;
and I get a message like "Updating 3,818 books" or whatever the text was.
More importantly perhaps - how is it that it's not possible to at least confirm this action?? How the H -e double hockey sticks did I get 190 or so extra books??

It seems the only way I can fix this now is to wipe the library and bring in my backup directory. So sad.

[theducks]

The status bar at the bottom of the main window always shows # selected

Bulk mode does allow multiple (fields) to be changed at one go. Did you modify the spelling of any other Tag?

[Divingduck]

+ maybe search highlithing active

[Micron]

No other tag - just wanted to remove the series character name that was in between the first and last name for the author. I guess my bigger surprise was that there was no way to cancel. Somewhat less surprising was that there's no confirmation for the operation, while there is for other operations. All in all, I have to say that when I started from scratch a couple of years ago (new installation of Calibre and first time choosing a directory of book titles) I was impressed with the power and simplicity of use. The ease of use goes away when your hard drive crashes and you have to reinstate things. I did Google, but found only how to back up a library or restore from a backup. Nothing about recovering one from another drive. It has been no end of frustration. I've probably spent far too many hours trying to fix that (but I guess that's another story). Would you believe Calibre runs for about 8 hours to build a new library? And that's only just under 7,000 books. I read somewhere here that someone manages 30,000 books with it and it's not slow for them. For that many books, I'd have to go on vacation and hope it was done when I return. And that's with a new laptop.

[Divingduck]

Originally Posted by Micron

All in all, I have to say that when I started from scratch a couple of years ago (new installation of Calibre and first time choosing a directory of book titles) I was impressed with the power and simplicity of use. The ease of use goes away when your hard drive crashes and you have to reinstate things. I did Google, but found only how to back up a library or restore from a backup. Nothing about recovering one from another drive. It has been no end of frustration. I've probably spent far too many hours trying to fix that (but I guess that's another story). Would you believe Calibre runs for about 8 hours to build a new library? And that's only just under 7,000 books. I read somewhere here that someone manages 30,000 books with it and it's not slow for them. For that many books, I'd have to go on vacation and hope it was done when I return. And that's with a new laptop.

Looks to me you are doing something wrong. My Databases are fare much bigger and I do this elementary library movements from A to B on the fly. The only limitation is in my case the hardware for mirroring hard disks or directories. After this is done I only tell calibre where to find the library and this took only some seconds for me.
Why should I rebuild or, what is more doubtful, import a complete library from an intact backup if I only need to copy a library backup from one to another place? I saw this (stupid) advice often in the internet. Not all advices are really helpful. Better to ask at the source for advice from people who know what they are doing.

This way is as old as calibre and had never changed. Backup and restore came much later because more and more calibre users are not able to make one or two directory copies (one for library and one for config directory). They need a button to do it, so Kovid implement this as brainless one click action. (...but, as I often see, it don't help too).