How to use calibre with a network drive? With NFS!
April 18, 2015 5 Comments
calibre is not exactly the program that will win a beauty contest, but functionally it is ok.
My library is pretty large, and keeping it entirely on my laptop is not reasonable. This led to the necessity of storing the library on a file server, and accessing it from my laptop.
Network drives are problematic
The calibre FAQ page clearly states:
Do not put your calibre library on a networked drive. … bad things will happen.
Well, I tested this myself and with AFP shares, bad things did happen :-(
Use NFS
But, with a little help from my friends (thank you, Bogdan!), I migrated the calibre library to a NFS share, and had no problems since.
NFS stands Network File System and is the venerable protocol protocol used by Unix. It might not be very efficient, but was designed with many great features, including exhaustive locking mechanisms, which the newer protocols compromise for speed.
I tried with two NFS servers, one on a Synology drive (Linux based), and the second on a Mac OS X Server (originally a BSD variant), and both worked without problems.
About Liviu Ionescu (ilg)
ilg The Geek's blog 
I’m running into a similar situation. Have you experimented with CIFS?
Nope.
Hi,
i’m also having big libraries and compatibility issues between Linux & Win10. So this looks interesting. do you have any tips on setting up NFS or with other words : are there any pitfalls
For starters, i know this might not work for everybody!
But…..in my case of running calibre on Win10 64bit. library on Synology NAS and Calibre-web on RPi4 docker i managed to use them all without problem. Yhe only thing i have to do before adding or editing books in Windows Calibre is go to the library folder with Windows Explorer and leave it open. That’s it! I just stopped looking for a good/serious/permanent solution….
Just my 2cents and might help some people ;-)
Works! Thank you