Transfering Books from one SD card to another, and transferring the Database itself

[PO40600]

Hello,

I'm using CC, both on my phone (Note 2), and on a 12" tablet (Note Pro).
For both, the books are stored in SD Card.

I intend to change my smartphone for a Galaxy Note 4. I know that the database is not stored on the SD card itself but in the main memory of the device.

Is there a way to easily transfer the database from the note 2 to the note 4 ? Since I have thousands of books I would prefer not to transfer them all from Calibre.

I think that transferring the content of the book's folder from one SD card to another is easy.

[eschwartz]

If you are rooted, there are many apps that let you make backups of other apps. That is the only option.

Even if you transfer the books via SD, without the database CC still has to wirelessly send the books to calibre for analysis in order to find out the metadata, so it can actually take longer than resending.
Although EPUBs can have some metadata extracted ondevice, so that is unnecessary.

[chaley]

To confirm what eschwartz said: there is no way to transfer the database short of a backup utility on a rooted phone. If you do this, please ensure that the path to the books is the same on the two devices.

To further confirm eschwartz, if the books are epubs and if the books are still in your calibre library then letting calibre and CC rebuild your database is a viable option. CC will extract metadata from the epubs and pass it on to calibre, where the books will be matched against the library and correct metadata resent to the device. This will take around 1 to 2 seconds per book.

[PO40600]

Thanks for the answer.

It will be quicker to resend all the books ....

[cybmole]

i thought that when you replaced an android phone, google took care of all this stuff for you. my wife broke her nexus 5 but as soon as I registered the replacement to her Google account, all her apps and settings were restored.

does that not apply to the CC database ( assuming that it's a CC from google play store) or does google only do this for certain phones & not for all android devices ?

I know that in our case we had to replace "data", like specific audiobooks, but if the CC database is considered to be data, how come you need root access to back it up / copy it ? & if its considered to be part of the app then does google take a back up?

[chaley]

Originally Posted by cybmole

i thought that when you replaced an android phone, google took care of all this stuff for you. my wife broke her nexus 5 but as soon as I registered the replacement to her Google account, all her apps and settings were restored.

does that not apply to the CC database ( assuming that it's a CC from google play store) or does google only do this for certain phones & not for all android devices ?

I know that in our case we had to replace "data", like specific audiobooks, but if the CC database is considered to be data, how come you need root access to back it up / copy it ? & if its considered to be part of the app then does google take a back up?

Android internal backup only works in some situations and has significant problems. Quoting Google documentation:

1. The backup transport provided by Android Backup Service is not guaranteed to be available on all Android-powered devices that support backup.
2. Some devices might support backup using a different transport, some devices might not support backup at all, and there is no way for your application to know what transport is used on the device.
3. This should be used only with small configuration files, not large binary files. [CC's SQLite database is a large binary file.]
4. Android makes no guarantees about the security of your data while using backup.
5. [R]eading and writing to files on internal storage is not threadsafe. [This means that unless you block access to the data during backup it can become corrupted.]

Because of these problems I chose not to enable Android backup in CC.