Possible to merge Bookpedia databases?

[TreverT]

Here's a "Gack" problem - My wife and I both work off of the same Bookpedia database, which is shared between my iMac and her laptop via the Dropbox folder. She didn't understand that she had to fully close Bookpedia to keep Dropbox from making backup copies, so for two months now, Dropbox has been saving conflicted versions of database additions in renamed pedia files. Now we have about six version conflicts in our Dropbox folder and the database she sees from the laptop doesn't match my version anymore. Is there a way to merge databases, without duplicating all the matching titles? That is, just add in the new books in the various conflicted versions without doubling up and importing everything again? I hope this makes some sense...

[Nora]

This is what I'd do: create a smart collection in your wife's Bookpedia with the criteria "Date added is after xxx" where xxx would be the date when the first conflict file appeared (at this point you and your wife would have been running separate databases). Then export that collection in .bookpedia format, quit the Bookpedia on your wife's computer and import the .bookpedia file into Bookpedia on your computer. Make the imported collection part of your library (File menu > Include collection in Library) select your Library collection and use the View menu > Display Duplicates to weed out the duplicates (you might want to display the date added column if you want to pick your version over your wife's when deleting). After this the books left in the imported collection would have been all the books that your wife added that were not part of your version.

Now solve the conflicts in Dropbox and get rid of the remaining conflicted files, then launch your wife's computer and it will see the only remaining database file in Dropbox. The one thing to check is quickly go through the covers on new entries since these might have been overwritten. If any should be wrong, use the contextual menu in the cover image well to download the right one. (You can read more about that feature on this blog post.)

If you're on version 5, download the beta as well since it plays even nicer with Dropbox. We just moved some trivial information into the plist file to avoid these problems with Dropbox, namely extra saves that can lead to possible conflicts.

[TreverT]

Thank you very much! Got it all sorted now, I think, after deleting something like 165 duplicate titles. In future I guess we will just have to be religiously careful to close Bookpedia after every use, and never be adding to it while another instance of the app is open. I also installed the beta for good measure, and all seems to be humming along fine now. I appreciate your aid!