Bad Kindle, no biscuit (nothing like losing ALL of your books at the start of your vacation...)

I just came back from Maine, a wonderful week of visiting my mother for the first time since Covid. The only issue with my trip was on the very first evening, I opened my Kindle to read a little before bed, and it was empty.

I had had 200+ unread books. A book I was in the middle of reading. Another book I had picked out to read on vacation. All gone. Not one single book on my Kindle.

I did a quick googling and it seems like Kindles don't like being disconnected from wifi. So I connected to my mother's, and books started downloading.

So. Many. Books. Thousands of them.

Turns out for some reason my Kindle was downloading every book I ever put on it. Fifteen or so years of books I had read and removed from it.

All except the books in the last couple years.

So the book I had been reading was gone. The book I intended to read on vacation was gone.

Since I don't read my books in the order I download them, the whole thing was just a complete mess. Only 200 of 3,000 books were ones I hadn't read yet, and Kindle thought they were all unread, so I couldn't sort by read/unread.

I ended up reading a book I had read years ago, and while I really enjoyed it, it was overshadowed by knowing that when I got home I'd have to deal with this mess.

I can't think of any way other than going one by one through those 3,000-something books and search each on my blog here, to see which ones I have read and reviewed. Unfortunately I only started reviewing books about ten years ago, so there will be a lot I read and never reviewed...

What a mess. I have all the books I've uploaded to my Kindle in a file on my computer, but that's the same 3,000-something pile of them.

Maybe I need to start making a monthly backup of my Kindle I guess. Or stop going on vacations...