Where is iBooks Collections data stored in El Capitan?

Question

Level 1

13 points

Where is iBooks Collections data stored in El Capitan?

So I made the BIG mistake of answering "yes" to "would you like to store your iBooks in iCloud" after upgrading to El Cap 10.11.4, and now my books are hosed. I was able to find and restore them from a Time Machine backup (Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books), but they all ended up in a single Collection (seemingly chosen randomly). Is there a .plist or some other such file I can restore to get me back my nice, organized iBooks Collections? Apple sure bungled this one.

Posted on Apr 19, 2016 12:02 PM

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Answer 1

Raicya

Level 10

208,299 points

Apr 25, 2016 12:37 PM in response to ditylmb

Hi,

Here they are stored in :

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books

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Answer 2

ditylmb Author

Level 1

13 points

Apr 25, 2016 4:02 PM in response to Raicya

Thanks, Raicya, but I already knew that--I mentioned that in my message. What I was looking for was a way to restore the iBooks Collections--I have many .pdf files that are organized and sorted in various collections, and Apple toasted that with the newest OS X release. It turns out that these collections are defined in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library.xml, but if I were to restore that, I would destroy other things. So this is a Catch-22. Unfortunately, Apple's carelessness cost me many hours of restoring my .pdf library and then reorganizing them into the collections I had (which Apple destroyed).

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Answer 3

Apr 26, 2016 7:40 PM in response to ditylmb

Hmm, I'm in a similar situation but didn't have any Collections set up. Luckily I had done a backup just before turning on iCloud Drive in iBooks when I opened it (whoops), so I just checked and I have that whole com.apple.BKAgentService folder intact with all my epubs/PDFs... but now trying to figure out how to turn off iCloud Drive for iBooks across the board and just restore them all without messing anything else up. Basically I think restoring your older iTunes Music Library.xml is likely to break other stuff that may have been updated since, I assume the iTunes Library.itl needs to be restored in tandem if we do that? Not sure what else. I just want to go back to using iTunes to sync because that's what I use for my iPhone/iPad for backups/synching anyway, so no point in using iCloud Drive.

I can't tell if I lost anything, but the first thing I noticed that was weird is that the ALL tab shows everything as far as I can tell (nowhere is there a total count of documents in iBooks that I can find), but both Books and PDFs tabs are blank. ***.

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Answer 4

Apr 26, 2016 8:32 PM in response to ditylmb

Did you try restoring BOTH of these folders? The second one I think might contain the order/collections/etc data.

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX

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Answer 5

Apr 26, 2016 9:19 PM in response to ditylmb

Actually, restoring both of the above folders from my backup fixed my situation, maybe it'll work for you too — again, I didn't have Collections set up so your mileage may vary. Follow the instructions here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7502625

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