I've been reading a book for months now and making important highlights as I go, and yesterday I realized that all highlights from the first 60% of the book were gone (I'm at around 80% now).
I loaded up the kindle and I see both the .azw3r file, which AFAIK contains the offsets for the highlights, but I also see an .azw3r.bad_file file alongside it. So somehow it became corrupted? I have no idea.
I opened them both in a hex editor and I definitely see data in both. I have no experience with reverse engineering, but I'm willing to put in the work if it means that I may have a chance to recover those highlights.
Preferably I'd love to merge both, but alternatively I'd love it if I could fix and use the old one since it should have way more highlights, then I can duplicate the book with a different name and give that one the newer .azw3r, then I can manually add the new highlights to the old one.
I guess I'm mainly curious if anyone has any idea what kind of format the file is in. I imagine it should be the same or similar to the other azw3 metadata files? Is it some serialization format similar to protocol buffers, BSON, or Thrift? Or is it some other custom format? And does anyone know the way in which the data is arranged? Are the highlights stored from earliest to latest in the book? Could there be a way to determine why the .bad_file one is considered to be a bad file, in the hopes that I may fix it?
I'm mainly looking for some direction to get started with this, as I've never done this sort of thing. Or if someone knows that it's hopeless then I won't bother :(
As an aside, the reason these highlights are important to me is that I read through the book making highlights as I go, then I go back and write up notes based on the highlights (i.e. the important bits). This allows me to read at a faster pace than I would if I had to writes notes as I went along. It has worked perfectly for dozens of books that I've read before, I just never imagined that the rug would be pulled from under me like this!
I loaded up the kindle and I see both the .azw3r file, which AFAIK contains the offsets for the highlights, but I also see an .azw3r.bad_file file alongside it. So somehow it became corrupted? I have no idea.
I opened them both in a hex editor and I definitely see data in both. I have no experience with reverse engineering, but I'm willing to put in the work if it means that I may have a chance to recover those highlights.
Preferably I'd love to merge both, but alternatively I'd love it if I could fix and use the old one since it should have way more highlights, then I can duplicate the book with a different name and give that one the newer .azw3r, then I can manually add the new highlights to the old one.
I guess I'm mainly curious if anyone has any idea what kind of format the file is in. I imagine it should be the same or similar to the other azw3 metadata files? Is it some serialization format similar to protocol buffers, BSON, or Thrift? Or is it some other custom format? And does anyone know the way in which the data is arranged? Are the highlights stored from earliest to latest in the book? Could there be a way to determine why the .bad_file one is considered to be a bad file, in the hopes that I may fix it?
I'm mainly looking for some direction to get started with this, as I've never done this sort of thing. Or if someone knows that it's hopeless then I won't bother :(
As an aside, the reason these highlights are important to me is that I read through the book making highlights as I go, then I go back and write up notes based on the highlights (i.e. the important bits). This allows me to read at a faster pace than I would if I had to writes notes as I went along. It has worked perfectly for dozens of books that I've read before, I just never imagined that the rug would be pulled from under me like this!