Today Kris brought up something that I had never thought about over on her blog…insuring your ebooks. I never considered the possibility because I am a paranoid person, I back up EVERYTHING. Well most of the time at least. When it comes to books tho? I never delete an ebook unless I hate it and I always have a backup. So, let’s talk about the ways you can back up your ebooks from your ereading device.

#1 – Trust the webstore you bought it from

Most ebook retailers keep a bookshelf of all your purchases so that you can re-download them at any time. Amazon for example will let you re-download books to your Kindle directly from the Kindle using your Content Manager. You can also login to Amazon.com from your computer and from your digital library resend your files to your computer hard drive or to the Kindle. This is certainly an easy to do it if you buy all your books from one or two select stores that offer this.

#2 – Keep a copy of your ebooks on your hard drive

I believe that all ereader devices offer the ability to plug your device into your computer and download your books from the device to a folder on your hard drive. This essentially gives you a copy on your ereader and one on your computer. This may be enough for some people…. it isn’t for me. I don’t like to keep books I have already read or am not reading currently on my Kindle. Instead I keep all of my library on my hard drive and only put on the Kindle things I am reading or going to read in the next few weeks. It keeps clutter down… it makes me happy. If you are this type of person too, you want to combine this method with an alternative backup system like one of the ones below…

#3 – Make a second copy of your library on a portal drive or DVD

If you keep your library on your computer you can always duplicate that by copying it to an external hard drive such as this or by burning your books to a DVD. A DVD is like 4gb work of space so it will hold a lot of books. The problem with this is that you have to remember to back up when you add new books…. I am just not that on top of it. I do burn my books to DVD about twice a year but it isn’t my main backup plan.

#4 – DropBox
DropBox.com is a online storage service that will sync with your computer. You get up to 2gb with a free account and that is plenty of space for an ebook library. I have well over 600 books in my library and have only used 30% of my space. All you do is sign up for an account and then install a bit of software onto your computer. This bit of software will allow you to specify a “drop box folder” on your computer. Anytime you make changes to this folder it will update your online storage account with those changes, ie. you specify your calibre library as your dropbox folder and you edit the Metadata of one of your books… the dropbox software will see that and update the same files you changed in your backup files located on dropbox.com

Because of the automatic syncing it works extremely well with ebook libraries. I mentioned Calibre in the example above… I bet some of you are still not using this software. If not, why?? It is the easiest library software you will find and just had a major update that lets you add custom columns so you can mark books read! Go, download it. now.

Making Calibre and DropBox play nicely
Ok, now that you have Calibre, let’s talk about how to make DropBox and Calibre share a library folder. easy

• Step 1 – Sign up for a Drop Box account.
• Step 2 – Follow the DropBox instructions and install the software. The software will ask you to place a folder called “DropBox” on your computer somewhere and within this folder is where your library will be. Think carefully about where you want to store your books, you should obviously choose a spot where you have at least 2GB of space if you think you will fill your drop box. Unsure where to put it? Generally, your “My Documents” folder would work fine. You can see mine is put inside a partition on my hard drive called “Storage”. It has a green check on the folder because it has been synced recently.
  

• Step 3 – Once the software is installed and you can create a NEW folder within the “DropBox” folder that will be your ebook library. This folder is “mostly” public on Dropbox.com – if someone has your user id or you gave them the link they would be able to browse inside of it. You can call the folder whatever you like – I used “MyBooks” as an example, mine has a secret name

  Current Calibre Users – You do not need to recreate a library folder. At this point you can move your current Calibre folder from it’s former location to inside the dropbox folder. Example, if you have a “Calibre Library” folder in your “My Documents” you want to copy the entire folder and then paste the entire folder inside your “DropBox” folder. You can rename it if you want as we will have to tell Calibre where the folder has moved to anyway.
  

• Note! There has been several Calibre updates since this tutorial was written. Below are screen shots for previous versions of the software (version a) followed by current version screenshots (version b).

  Step 4 (version a)- Set your Calibre preferences. Open up Calibre(if you were a previous user it may give you an error saying your library is missing or it may just open up and all your books will be gone. DO NOT WORRY!). Once Calibre is open, hit the “PREFERENCES” tab along the top menu bar. Under the General tab you are going to specify the location of your ebooks, this is where you want to browse to find your “MyBooks” folder within the “DropBox” folder. Once it is set, click OK. You are done! Once you do that, if you had a previous library all of your books should now be visible in Calibre again tho it may take some time or it may take a restart of Calibre depending on your system.

  
  

  Step 4 (version b)- Set your Calibre preferences. Open up Calibre (if you were a previous user it may give you an error saying your library is missing or it may just open up and all your books will be gone. DO NOT WORRY!). Once Calibre is open, look to the top menu bar and look for a book count tab situated between the “Convert Books” and “Save to Disk” options. Your top menu may look different! I believe I’ve customized my top tool bar, but you are basically looking for a link that drops down to show your library options. Under this library tab you want to choose the “Switch/Create Library” menu item. This will open up a pop up that will inform you of your current library location and allow you to browse to find your “MyBooks” folder within the “DropBox” folder. Once it is set, click OK. You are done! Once you do that, if you had a previous library all of your books should now be visible in Calibre again tho it may take some time or it may take a restart of Calibre depending on your system.

Now whenever you update your calibre library, it will update your online library of books…. giving you 2 complete backups of your ebooks. If you get a new computer or lose your hard drive all you have to do is download dropbox again and it will create the folders and put all your books back into them.

If you want to go a step further and create a viewable web catalog of your books that you can can browse on your phone, check out Dear Author’s post on creating a cloud. I admit I have done it, but being a Kindle owner it would require me to keep both kindle format and epub in my library to read with stanza. Because of that I never read on my iphone unless through Kindle for iPhone. I keep mine set up tho because I like being able to browse the covers of all my books.

I hope that helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have or contribute any other backup ideas you have!

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