Apple Books
The following information assumes that Apple Books syncing with iCloud Drive is disabled!
Complete archive and restore scripts are available in scripts/apple-books.
What To Archive/Restore?
Apple Books stores the bulk of its data in two locations:
-
The location of EPUBs, PDFs, Audiobooks, etc.:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService -
The location of the library's databases:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX
However, only archiving and restoring these directories might miss some
metadata. Searching ~/Library/Containers for anything that contains Books
yields some other directories:
$ find ~/Library/Containers -type d -name "*Books*"
./com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks
./com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books
./com.apple.iBooksX
./com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/BCCloudKit-iBooks
./com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/BCCloudAsset-iBooks
./com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/BKBookstore
./com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.iBooksX
./com.apple.iBooksX.CacheDelete
./com.apple.iBooksX.DiskSpaceEfficiency
./com.apple.iBooksX.SharingExtension
./com.apple.iBooksX-SecureUserDefaults
Using BK as a proxy for Books yields no additional directores:
$ find ~/Library/Containers -type d -name "*BK*"
./com.apple.BKAgentService
./com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/BKSeriesDatabase
./com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/BKLibraryDataSourceDevelopment
./com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/BKLibrary
./com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/BKBookstore
So it's safe to assume any directory starting with com.apple.Books or
com.apple.BK is important. Therefore, these two globs along with Apple Books'
Group Container should be used for archiving and restoring:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BK*
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooks*
~/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.apple.iBooks
Important Note
Archiving/restoring will work only if the path to the username has not
changed since the library was archived. Doing a few searches shows that the
username has been hard-coded into some files. This is most evident in the
BKLibrary-*.sqlite file which contains absolute paths to library files.
For example:
$ find ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService \
-type f -a -exec grep -l --exclude=\*.{htm,html,xhtml} $USER {} +
.../.com.apple.containermanagerd.metadata.plist
.../Container.plist
.../Data/Documents/iBooks/Books/Books.plist
$ find ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX* \
-type f -a -exec grep -l --exclude=\*.{htm,html,xhtml} $USER {} +
.../com.apple.iBooksX/.com.apple.containermanagerd.metadata.plist
.../com.apple.iBooksX/Container.plist
.../com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/BKLibrary/BKLibrary-1-091020131601.sqlite-wal
.../com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/BKLibrary/BKLibrary-1-091020131601.sqlite
.../com.apple.iBooksX-SecureUserDefaults/.com.apple.containermanagerd.metadata.plist
.../com.apple.iBooksX-SecureUserDefaults/Container.plist
.../com.apple.iBooksX.CacheDelete/.com.apple.containermanagerd.metadata.plist
.../com.apple.iBooksX.CacheDelete/Container.plist
.../com.apple.iBooksX.DiskSpaceEfficiency/.com.apple.containermanagerd.metadata.plist
.../com.apple.iBooksX.DiskSpaceEfficiency/Container.plist
.../com.apple.iBooksX.SharingExtension/.com.apple.containermanagerd.metadata.plist
.../com.apple.iBooksX.SharingExtension/Container.plist