I think I have broken my database

[speakingtohe]

Not a big deal, just want to know where I have gone wrong.

I added books from directories including subdirectories and that went ok till it came to the point where it said add duplicates.

• Calibre stopped responding.
• I went to bed and left computer on and it was still not responding this AM.
• I closed it and rebooted
• I opened it and found 13764 books which is probably close without duplicates, maybe it is close with.
• Then I checked database integrity which failed.

I am not worried about starting over as most books I have edited metadata I saved to disk.

I may have been having memory problems as I am inclined to make my computer multi-task to the point it chokes for a bit, but usually things come back from not responding.

I know the best thing to do is probably to refrain from adding duplicates, but I would like to have those duplicates in there for obscure reasons of my own.

Any insight would be appreciated
Thanks
Helen

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Then I checked database integrity which failed.

What version are you on. I saw a reported bug that 0.6.48 had broken the integrity check, and Kovid left it open, so it may have merit.

I know the best thing to do is probably to refrain from adding duplicates, but I would like to have those duplicates in there for obscure reasons of my own.

There's nothing wrong with having duplicates. The message is just to let you know, in case you don't want them.

BTW, There are two "duplicates" messages. One is the duplicates where it's telling you that you are going to get two records for the same book title. You get this message whenever the titles are identical.

The other message is where the checkbox in Add/Save to automatically add books to existing records when the author/title are similar is on. In this case, the message is telling you that it found a book that is being merged into the existing record and you're only going to be left with one record.

Also, IIRC, the latter message is occasionally wrong - it gets triggered even if the new book isn't added to the old record, due to it being the same format as the matching record. In that case, you might have wanted to see the first message and optionally add the new book as a second record, but that's not the way it was implemented.