#calibre sync

I love reading fanfiction. I copy it to my tablet so I can read it offline wherever I go.

It used to be easy. I would download the fics to Calibre (using the FanFicFare plugin) and copy it to my tablet with Calibre Companion (an app on my tablet).

Unfortunately, Calibre Companion has been abandoned for years and no longer works well. 😔

After trying various ways to get my library from my computer to my tablet, here's what I've finally settled on:

Using the FanFicFare plugin for the Calibre Ebook Management software, I download the fanfiction to an external USB drive.

Whenever I plug in the drive, I have AOMEI Backupper copy my library from my USB drive to my computer (so that I can open Calibre on my USB drive and not have subsequent steps be messed up with locked files and the like). It's set up to automatically copy the files when the USB drive is connected, so I don't have to worry about that.

I use Resilio Sync to sync from the drive on my computer to my tablet's storage.* (It takes a little fiddling with the settings**, but it now updates my tablet automatically whenever changes are made. And since the changes are only made when I plug in the USB drive, that's once a day.)

Then I use Calibre Sync on my tablet to access my library on my tablet's Micro SD card. (I even changed the setting to automatically sync the library whenever it's opened so that I don't have to worry about that.)

It's a little convoluted and it means I have 3 copies of my library on various devices (well, 4 since I have a backup tablet in case my main tablet breaks), but it works and seems to work seamlessly. I have a collection of over 40k stories, and this setup had no problem handling them.

(* I tried Syncthing to copy the files, but it was taking forever to do so. With Resilio Sync, it took about 4 hours or so, and that includes downloading the Calibre-generated covers for all of the books.)