Calibre-Web has “archived” >1000k books, unprompted.

[graveness9764]

Describe the bug/problem

I love Calibre-Web. Thanks so much for putting in so much hard work to make our lives easier.

Over a 1000k books in my calibre library have somehow ended up in the Calibre-Web archive. This happened some months ago during installation and was not at my request.

I cannot find a way to unarchive them en masse.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to my archives books section
2. Find enormous numbers of archived books.

Logfile

I don’t think the logfile shows anything relevant here.

Expected behavior

A way to archive multiple books at a time, through some sort of “select all”.

Environment (please complete the following information):

• OS: DietPi 6.8.1
• Python version: 3.11
• Calibre-Web version: 0.6.22
• Docker container: LinuxServer
• Special Hardware: Rasperry Pi 5
• Browser: Safari 17.5

Additional context
None I can think of

[OzzieIsaacs]

There is indeed no option currently. Workaround is to open the app.db file in the calibre-web root folder with a SQLite editor, do a backup of the file before. Search for the ‚archived_book‘ table and delete all entries in this table.

[OzzieIsaacs]

I started working on a feature like this, but got distracted several month ago

[graveness9764]

Thank you both for your help.
I ended up just clicking through each title…

appreciate all your hard work!

[OzzieIsaacs]

One thing for the reason: I don't think it came out of nowhere. I assume the following story:

• You got sync working, all your books have been synced to kobo reader.
• You decided to only sync "books of a certain shelf", added a few books to the shelf
• You synced your Kobo reader
• Calibre-Web found >1k books on your reader which don't belong to the shelf and therefore should not be on the reader. Calibre-Web requested deletion on the reader and archived the books on calibre-web

This is necessary, because otherwise you would start syncing books of a certain shelf, but all books would stay on the reader. This would lead to the question: "What to do" to remove the books from the reader. Answer: Archive them manually. So the automatic version is the better one, and we need the button unarchive all.
There is meanwhile a PR for it on the way: #3113

[MoSattler]

I ran into the same issue, for the same reasons @OzzieIsaacs played out.

Is there any way in the meantime to just check all books and then click a single unarchive button? Or do I have to go into "Edit" for every single book?

[OzzieIsaacs]

There is a pull request for this, but not merged. The other option is to edit the app.db file with a sqlite editor and delete the archived books table content

[aksiksi]

Here is what I had to do:

# Change your path accordingly
sudo sqlite3 /var/volumes/calibre-web/app.db

SQLite version 3.45.3 2024-04-15 13:34:05
Enter ".help" for usage hints.

sqlite> DELETE FROM archived_book;

[hjdarnel]

I think this is really unintuitive. Essentially you lose the ability to ever sync only a shelf, if you didn't have that option selected initially.

[SirJohnDoe]

One thing for the reason: I don't think it came out of nowhere. I assume the following story:

• You got sync working, all your books have been synced to kobo reader.
• You decided to only sync "books of a certain shelf", added a few books to the shelf
• You synced your Kobo reader
• Calibre-Web found >1k books on your reader which don't belong to the shelf and therefore should not be on the reader. Calibre-Web requested deletion on the reader and archived the books on calibre-web

This is necessary, because otherwise you would start syncing books of a certain shelf, but all books would stay on the reader. This would lead to the question: "What to do" to remove the books from the reader. Answer: Archive them manually. So the automatic version is the better one, and we need the button unarchive all. There is meanwhile a PR for it on the way: #3113

I noticed that even books that are added to the shelf are archived. Basically all my books were added to shelves, and 'Sync only books in selected shelves with Kobo' was turned off. When turning it on, every book was archived, regardless if it was on a shelf that would be synced or not. I can replicate this everytime I turn on this setting: all books are archived everytime.