Saturday 23rd May 2020
Last year, I had a major hard disk crash.
Luckily, all my writing is automatically backed up so data loss wasn’t even a concern. But I managed to lose my ebook library.
This in itself, wasn’t too much of a worry, as the vast majority of my books are kindle and I could always download them again. However, there were a few I got a freebies from places like Tor, or Hugo voter packets.
Reading on electronic devices has intrigued me again. I love physical books but sometimes it’s not practical to carry a hardback around. My kindle is around 10 years old so I’ve been looking at a new one with better back lighting. I could read on my Fire but the backlight hurts my eyes me after an extended period of time.
So the last couple of days has seen me dig out the old faulty drive, put it in an enclosure and try and get it to read. It errors all over the place but some times it reads long enough to grab files off. I’m not sure if the index has corrupted or something to make it so slow and intermittent, but I’ve tried all manner of disc recovery software to no effect. The best I’ve found is to persevere and get what you can if it does load before it crashes again.
Anyways, I managed to recover the vast majority of ebook files yesterday (save a couple of huge PDFs) and have spent the morning trying to rebuild Calibre. Annoyingly, I can’t get Calibre to accept the library that is in place and just index it, so it just takes my files and makes copies, doubling the library size. It also wants to file some books as “Author surname, Author first name” and others as “Author first name Author Surname”.
I now have memories of the amount of time I spent trying to tidy up my library back when it was on the old computer. I got cover files for those missing and they do seem to have come across, but the metadata still seems screwy.
I’ve also bought myself a new Kindle Paperwhite (plus an incorrect case – they gave me the wrong one) and have been scanning for any kindle ebook deals. Luckily even while I’ve been predominantly reading hardcopies over the last few years, I’ve not passed up the odd Amazon deal, so I have a huge backlog to read.
I recently finished the audiobook for Best Served Cold and I like that the device can do audible as well. So we’ll get to see how I use the device
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Past Years: 2019 – The Year of Soldiering Through | 2018 – The Year of Priorities | 2017 – The Year Of The Offensive
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