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Bootleglibrary

The digital bootleg library in its current configuration lives on a Calibre-web installation on a RPi4.

The path to the library (books and metadata.db) should be:

/media/usb/'Bootleg Library'

or something similar.

There are two USB drives auto-mounted to the RPi, one for the library (mounted to the path mentioned above) and one for the backup.

Every Monday at 02:00 a cronjob runs to backup from the library USB to the backup USB.

More about how the library is set up here: https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:Simon/Trim4/prototypes/bootleg_library_setup

Login (after http-password)

Default admin login

Username: admin Password: admin123


The library is currently down because of an error with the database, which is malformed, giving the following error:

(sqlite3.DatabaseError) database disk image is malformed

Most likely this is because the USB has become corrupted, including the metadata.db file.

However, each folder of each book includes a metadata.opf file. From these, it is possible to regenerate the metadata.db file, using calibredb: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/calibredb.html#restore-database

It is possible to recover the database by running calibredb from the command line, as suggested by the developer of calibre, Kovid Goyal (in post #2): https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=262064

I tried this, and Calibre couldn't find a file needed to regenerate the database "metadata_pre_restore.db". This file, and the "metadata.db" file are supposed to be automatically generated when installing Calibre.

4 Oct 2023 Restoring with calibre was tricky as the library rebuilding tools (calibredb restore_database) and also using Calibre's graphical interface to restore a library, both only found those books that had an OPF file. Unfortunately, it seems that the OPF file isn't automatically created when books are added (and perhaps not edited) in calibre-web. SO... it's possible to use calibredb's add command to re-add all the books back and rebuild everything. BUT, the downside here is that all the the books will get renumbered and thus break all existing links (which feels like a big pity as someone who likes to link to specific books / pages).

SO what I am doing is: (1) Locally on my laptop, I rebuild a new library with: calibredb add -r -1 --library-path=tmp/ Bootleg\ Library/ where tmp is a new directory... NB: all the books that are found and added get an OPF file.

(2) Copy the OPF file from the newly generated library, into the old library for books that have no OPF file already. In doing this, REWRITE the OPF calibre_id to match the old ID (which is in the folder name).

(3) Finally run
    calibredb restore_database