I got some help from help from capink and chaley on this. I exported my entire Calibre library using Calibre’s “Save to Disk” feature using a template that would match CC’s own template for saving the directory structure. In the end what worked was surprisingly simple (only in retrospect, I must add). The upside of it is there would be no connection issues as as there would be with using the Calibre content server or a cloud service. The downside of this method is the obvious one of needing at least enough free space roughly twice the size of your library and the fact that it would take days to move, since CC would still have to move every ebook as well as its accompanying metadata. I pondered different ways of rebuilding my CC library, such as moving my entire Calibre library to a folder on the external SD card and using CC’s option to use another device or SD card as a cloud library. What would even be faster would be to have folders for each letter of the alphabet and author directories within those of authors whose last names start with that letter. I thought I would at least rebuild it more efficiently, with subdirectories for each author, which would speed things up. Somewhere around the time I reached 18,000 books I noticed a tremendous slowdown on transferring books to the tablet. When I first started using CC in December 2012 I never anticipated my library growing from under a 1,000 books to over 20,000 (95Gb), so I was using the default template in CC, which puts all the ebooks in a single directory. When I got home I thought I would take the opportunity to rebuild the entire Calibre Companion library on my android tablet (A Samsung Tab A 8” running Android Pie (9)). But Calibre Companion was pretty much unusable since my backup was two years old (I will be much more diligent about backing it up going forward).

I want to make it clear that I didn’t actually lose the ebooks themselves since, luckily, they were stored on an external SD card. One such app was veriFLY and another the Viking app (The trip was a cruise around the Aegean Sea). And had to load large PDFs of my test results on to my tablet. I had to free up space to install various apps to prove I was vaccinated AND recently tested.

That is, other than to say, that COVID-19 was partially to blame. I won’t go into the details about A) Why I have that many ebooks on a tablet (I create ebooks for a living is the short answer) or B) How I accidently deleted my library. On a recent trip to Greece and Turkey I accidently deleted my 20,000+ Calibre Companion ebook library.

Connect calibre android phone