Making a backup
A collection is one file, which makes backing it up easy — and makes losing it easy too. All My Books can do it for you.
Automatic backups
Set this up once and forget about it. In :
- Tick Enable automatic backup.
- Set Copies to store — how many generations to keep before the oldest is replaced.
- Set Days between copies — how often a new generation is made.
- Choose Folder for backup copies.
Because several dated copies are kept, you can go back to the state of the collection a week ago, not just to yesterday — which matters when a mistake goes unnoticed for a while.
Backups go to the cloud. If All My Books finds a cloud-synced folder on the computer — OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Yandex.Disk and the like — a new installation puts the backup folder there by default. In an older installation that still keeps its copies on the same disk as the collection, the program asks once, before the next automatic copy, whether to move them to the cloud. The collection itself stays local and fast, while the copies end up off the machine and survive a disk failure — which is the point of a backup. The cloud button next to Folder for backup copies sets such a folder by hand.
Making a copy right now
- Choose (Ctrl+B).
- Pick a folder and a name.
- Click Save.
Do this before anything large and irreversible: an import, an append, a batch update or a mass delete.
Restoring
A backup is an ordinary .amb file. Open it with
to check that it
holds what you expect. Because it lies in the backup folder (or has a name like
Books[3].amb), All My Books recognises it as a backup copy and
offers to copy it to the working folder under a clean name and open that copy
instead. Answer Yes: otherwise the program would go on
making backups of the backup, and the file names would grow like
Books[3][1][2].amb. Alternatively, copy the backup over the damaged
file while All My Books is closed.
Covers. If covers are stored outside the database (the default), copy the folder of images next to the collection as well. With Store all the images inside the database switched on, the single file already contains everything — see Setting up preferences.
Backups and exports are never blocked by the licence state: you can always get your data out. See Trial, free mode and licence.
Free to try. Catalog up to 100 books at no cost, forever.