How to easily backup all your notes, marks & reading positions with rsync under Linux

[Dylan Tomorrow]

Hi guys,

I have lost the notes, marks and reading positions of my personal docs not synced to the Amazon cloud in the past (e.g. calibre deletes them when you use it to delete ebooks from the device) and wanted to easily back them up locally, especially as those are tiny, tiny files.

Because I already have the whole ebook library in calibre plus a backup I did not want to create another full backup with all the ebook files in it, just those ancillary files.

Enter rsync, one of my favourite Linux command line tools!

I just had to google and read the Manpage a bit and survey the file endings used for the different note formats, and voilá:

rsync -ahvh --progress --prune-empty-dirs --include-from="rsync-include.txt" --exclude='*' /media/Kindle/documents/ ~/Backups/Kindle/2012-10-24/documents/

wherein the rsync-include.txt reads as follows:

*/
*.mbp
*.mbp1
*.mbs
*.azw3r
*.azw3f
*.pds
*.pdt
*.tal
*.tas
*.apnx
*.phl
*.asc
*.ea

This preserves the directory structure. Adapt the file paths to your own setup, of course. E.g. on Fedora 16 and above, /media/kindle needs to be changed to /run/media/<user>/Kindle. You may have to mkdir the backup destination directory first.

*.apnx are page numbers, *.phl are public highlights and *.asc are end action (*.ea on the Kindle 3) and X-Ray files, all of which you can refetch from Amazon for their books (so feel free to remove those), but all the other endings are the four times two note and reading position formats for MOBIs, AZW3s (KF8), PDFs and AZW1s (Topaz) respectively.

Includes findings from qlob.

[qlob]

Thanks so much for this! I will definitely use this! The only thing I use is linux, and sooner or later i was going to wite a script to launch rdiffbackup everytime I plug in my Kindle...

[zeb]

Thanks a lot.

[Dylan Tomorrow]

You are welcome! I was wondering if this would reach anyone at all ...

One caveat: I got the file endings from looking at all the files on my Kindle Touch, if you have another model of the Kindle it may use some different file endings (I've read somewhere that the endings changed with the Touch), so you may have to add them to the rsync-include.txt. I collected them via (assuming the folder naming did not also change ):

cd /media/Kindle/documents/
ls *.sdr
ls */*.sdr

[qlob]

FYI, on Fedora 16 and above, /media/kindle needs to be changed to /run/media/<user>/Kindle

[qlob]

Also .ea is another file extension i see here on my K3.