After the most recent update to Calibre Web I had an issue logging in. In true me-fashion I  screwed around for a bit and then tried reinstalling. It worked. However that overwrote the database that held all my settings and poof! — all my shelves were gone. That was a listing of all my books read from 2015 to now. Grrr.

(As a side note, just as I was mildly panicking about this, L plaintively called my name and informed me she had lost her much beloved sapphire in the garden bed. So off I went to hack and slash the flowerbed to look for it. Luckily a) it’s fall and it needed hacking and slashing and b) it only took about 15 minutes to find it. So all’s well on that score.)

Anyway back at my desk, I was a bit annoyed and went digging around in the file repo (always doing things the hard way…) to try and find where the shelves and their contents might be stored and if they were recoverable. Eventually I realized two small, but significant facts: 1) I had for some odd reason copied the calibre-web folder before reinstalling—I almost never make backups… I must be learning finally! and 2) there is a handy FAQ… duh.

https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/FAQ

What do I do if I lose my “Admin” password?
If there are more than on admin on your instance any other admin can generate a new password for your account. If the only admin forgot his password: You are in trouble. Currently no password reset function is implemented. The only option would be editing the password in the app.db with a sqlite Database editor, or starting from the beginning.

How to Backup Calibre-Web Settings?
All settings of Calibre-Web are stored in the app.db in the root folder of the project.If you are using Google Drive as ebook storage than you also need to backup the gdrive.db, settings.yaml and gdrive_credentials files.

So obviously the info was in the app.db file! I then spent about 15 minutes trying to download  a SQLite editor (DB Browser for SQLite https://sqlitebrowser.org/dl/) via brew (brew install --cask db-browser-for-sqlite) which helpfully installed an app in the Applications folder. Then I dug around for another 5 minutes trying to figure out the SQL statement to import the data from the backup database into the active database until the lightbulb went off (of the low wattage LED variety if that matters) it occurred to me that was completely unnecessary.

Just copy the backup app.db over the current app.db you idiot…but make a backup first!

So I did.

And it worked.

All’s well that ends well.