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

[tonystower]

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

[tonystower]

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.