PRS-505 All tags lost - Backup?

[Bitman]

Hi everybody,

I'm new to the forum. I'm a very happy owner of a Sony PRS-505 from Italy.
I use it with Calibre and have a 2 GB card always installed.

The only issue I encountered in 18 months of use is that when *something* goes wrong, the reader loses all info (tags?) about books (title, author), etc.; info has to be written back from within Calibre.

Being sick and tired of all this, I decided to have a full backup of the internal memory and SD card on the hard disk of my PC, reckoning that in this way I would be able to easily restore the tags in case of trouble (similar to Windows' System Restore). Well, guess what? Trouble happened today, but my restore strategy did not work .

I copied the backup from my hard disk to the Sony, removed the USB cable, the Sony took an awful lot of time (presumably reindexing all the ebooks, there are 161 on it) after which all tags were reverted back to the ones built into the files.

I tried several times to no avail. The interesting thing is that if I open Calibre after having restored my backup, it lists all books with their correct tags.

I understand the info is located in the media.xml files. Opening media.xml from my backup reveals lots of information including all the correct tags. I can only assume there are other files as well, maybe hidden, which happen to be inconsistent with my memory snapshot and trigger a full reindexing of the books.

Is there a way to render my tags permanent? If not, is there a safe way to backup the cache?

Thanks,
-- Carlo aka Bitman.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Bitman

Being sick and tired of all this, I decided to have a full backup of the internal memory and SD card on the hard disk of my PC, reckoning that in this way I would be able to easily restore the tags in case of trouble (similar to Windows' System Restore). Well, guess what? Trouble happened today, but my restore strategy did not work .

It isn't a backup until you restore it and it works.

Originally Posted by Bitman

I copied the backup from my hard disk to the Sony, removed the USB cable, the Sony took an awful lot of time (presumably reindexing all the ebooks, there are 161 on it) after which all tags were reverted back to the ones built into the files.

I tried several times to no avail. The interesting thing is that if I open Calibre after having restored my backup, it lists all books with their correct tags.

It is only 161 books. Calibre is your backup. Just use Calibre to delete the books from the Sony. Now select the 161 books in Calibre and send them to the device. It only takes a couple of minutes and all your collections will be back just like before.

[Bitman]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

It isn't a backup until you restore it and it works.

True, true

Originally Posted by dwanthny

It is only 161 books. Calibre is your backup. Just use Calibre to delete the books from the Sony. Now select the 161 books in Calibre and send them to the device. It only takes a couple of minutes and all your collections will be back just like before.

Thanks for your reply dwanthny but, well, maybe I'm not using Calibre the "right" way.
What I do is manually copy the files to the reader, then use Calibre only as an editor in order to tag them with the correct author/title info. Calibre has no means to restore the reader.

The interesting thing is, I finally solved this riddle
It has to do with the _creation_ timestamp of files: if the timestamp of a file differs from the one recorded in the xml, the reader treats the file as modified and re-reads the tag info.
Obviously, my backup system maintained the original _modification_ timestamps but modified the file _creation_ timestamps, triggering the reread of every bit of information (also from MP3 and JPG files - lots of them on my device).

I was able to sort the mess out using a free tool called Moo0 TimeStamp, after having to deal with another nasty issue related to daylight savings time - every summer timestamp off by one hour.

And for the future? I have a feeling that even using Calibre the right way, the timestamps would get fully renewed in case of a restore, losing the very useful ability to search the books by date. I'm considering using Ghost to snapshot the contents of the reader - Only have to check if the operation preserves the creation timestamps.

-- Carlo aka Bitman

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Bitman

Thanks for your reply dwanthny but, well, maybe I'm not using Calibre the "right" way.
What I do is manually copy the files to the reader, then use Calibre only as an editor in order to tag them with the correct author/title info. Calibre has no means to restore the reader.

If I understand you right you are indeed missing out on the core use of Calibre. All metadata updating, authors, titles, tags, etc... is best done in the the main Calibre library. I attached a image of my library.

Now at any time I want I can remove the files off of my 505 (using Calibre) then select a 161 new books and using Calibre send them to my device. The author, title and tags/collections will be transferred to. This would just take a minute or two.

Calibre is the restore solution to the trouble you seem to be having.