Removing Mobi Books from Calibre? Yes or No?

[MRM66]

I have 4,000 ebooks and most of them are mobi and epub.

Should I remove the mobis now?

My whole Calibre folder is 14Gb.

But will it also remove the Epub & Mobi format I have typed in the format boxes?

[theducks]

Do you really need the space?
The DB size won't change (much) because Calibre is a Hybrid of a SQL db and the OS file system. so performance won't improve significantly.

Search:

formats:EPUB and formats:mobi

To see how many have your issue

FWIW I Keep track of the original format in a custom column. I don't clean out that.

You can select ALL (ABOVE SEARCH results only showing): Right-click: Remove books: OF A SPECIFIC FORMAT: Mobi
This is not un-doable

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

This is not un-doable

Are you sure about that, I use delete a format frequently, always have. In recent times the deleted files end up in the format section of caltrash… a feature that the old recycle bin usage lacked.

BR

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Are you sure about that, I use delete a format frequently, always have. In recent times the deleted files end up in the format section of caltrash… a feature that the old recycle bin usage lacked.

BR

But that caltrash (calibre trash) is deleted after some times (you can configure time). And I think you can clean it immediately but I'm not sure as I've not used that feature.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Are you sure about that, I use delete a format frequently, always have. In recent times the deleted files end up in the format section of caltrash… a feature that the old recycle bin usage lacked.

BR

I forgot about that fairly recent (7.x) enhancement. But that is not present in all older version, so the statement is still advisable to heed.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

But that caltrash (calibre trash) is deleted after some times (you can configure time). And I think you can clean it immediately but I'm not sure as I've not used that feature.

As well as delete after a number of days, you can configure caltrash to empty itself 'on close' - which is what I do. I think that option was added after the initial release of the caltrash feature.

BR

[MRM66]

All this is very confusing to me sorry.
To my logic I dont need the mobi files anymore....
But up till a couple of weeks ago I had been converting all of my books to mobi and epubs, and noting that in the description.
Such a lot of files
Don't know what to do for the best.

[DNSB]

Personally, I would do a search for all books in both epub and mobi formats (the formats:EPUB and formats:mobi search suggested by @theducks). Once the search has finished, select all the books, right-click, go down to the Remove books menu item and hover until the sub-menu pops open. From the sub-menu, click on Remove files of a specific format from selected books. From the pop-up, double check that the count for ePub and mobi are the same, hightlight mobi and click OK. This will remove all the mobi books where the same book exists in ePub format.

[MRM66]

That seems so simple, yet I get nervous lol

But after years I upgraded Calibre from 4.15 to 7.11 last week, which was major for me!

Would keep the Mobis to still add to my 2nd Gen Kindle, but it doesnt seem to want to charge anymore...
And I love my new Kobo Clara Colour now lol

[DNSB]

If worse comes to worse, you can go to the last item in the Delete books submenu and restore recently deleted books. One of the nice updates in calibre 7 since unlike a restore from the trash/recycle bin/whatever, the books go back to where they came from.

[MRM66]

Originally Posted by theducks

[B]
This is not un-doable

Where do they go?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by theducks

This is not un-doable

Originally Posted by theducks

I forgot about that fairly recent (7.x) enhancement. But that is not present in all older version, so the statement is still advisable to heed.

Originally Posted by MRM66

Where do they go?

I added in the second quote from @theducks to clarify a bit.

In older version of calibre, the files went to the recyle bin/trash/whatever. In calibre 7, it has the caltrash and you can easily undelete from there. You could restore files in older calibre versions but you needed to restore them outside of your calibre library and manually re-import them.

[MRM66]

I did something wrong
Did a search formats:EPUB and formats:mobi
All books are selected

Once the search has finished, select all the books, right-click, go down to the Remove books menu item and hover until the sub-menu pops open.
From the sub-menu, click on Remove files of a specific format from selected books.

I did all that.
But only the 1st highlighted book mobi was removed
Even though the whole page was highlighted

[MRM66]

Tried to upload a photo of my formats but cant see where
So... i have

AZW3 2685
EPUB 4418
MOBI 4250
ORIG AZW3 13
ORIG EPUB 1524
ORIG MOBI 73
PDF 14

[DNSB]

When I entered formats:EPUB and formats:mobi, it returned the 5 books where I had just generated a .mobi file. Since I searched only for books that had both an epub and a mobi format present and they came up selected, I deleted the .mobi format files by clicking on mobi and then okay.

The first image is how the search string looked in my search bar and the 5 books the search returned, the second is the dropdown when I right-clicked on the selected files and the third is the popup box (notice that it shows 5 files since I only generated 5 mobi ebooks out of the 40 or so in my Intake library.

Now if the last image did not show 5 ePub and 5 mobi, I would have panicked and cancelled.