Three Questions about calibre running/busy status

[sgmoore]

1) What is the best way to determine if calibre is running?

2) Is there a way to determine if calibre is busy?

3) What happens if calibre is shutdown (using the --shutdown-running-calibre command line) whilst calibre is busy?

The questions arose from something that happened recently. I have a custom column to determine the type of book (e.g. eBook, Audiobook, Paperback) and when I added a new book and set the type I must have accidentality entered the value with a slightly different case (ebook instead of eBook). That seems to trigger a background update where calibre updated the opf of all my existing ebooks (over 5000 in number) and this process seems to have taken at least three hours.

So, if I want to shutdown calibre before running a backup routine, what would happen if I tried this whilst it was in the middle of updating all these opf files?

[kovidgoyal]

background updates will automatically be shutdown when you shutdown calibre. And resumed when you restart it. You dont need to worry about them.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by sgmoore

. . .

So, if I want to shutdown calibre before running a backup routine, what would happen if I tried this whilst it was in the middle of updating all these opf files?

You could do what I do:

Run calibredb backup_metadata against each calibre library at the start of the backup script, that will finish off any outstanding updates at full throttle. Gets them out of the way for next time you start calibre.

BR

[sgmoore]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

You could do what I do:

Run calibredb backup_metadata against each calibre library at the start of the backup script, that will finish off any outstanding updates at full throttle. Gets them out of the way for next time you start calibre.

BR

Just to double check.

Does that mean I should Stop calibre first and then run the "calibredb backup_metadata" command.

I can't seem to run this command while calibre is running (even with the --with-library option), but I was worried that stopping calibre would lose any outstanding updates.

[BetterRed]

Firstly, if you stop calibre when there are outstanding metadata.opf updates, when you run calibre again it will resume processing the outstanding updates.

Secondly, you can't run the calibre library manager (GUI) and calibredb commands concurrently. The only CLI programs I ever run alongside calibre.exe are ebook-edit and ebook-viewer.

The reason I force the metadata.opf updates to complete before my daily backup is to ensure that if I restore anything from that backup I am not restoring 'out of date' data.

BR