Data Backup Digest

Kindle provides a great, convenient way to carry a lot of books on the go. However, what happens if you want to back up all the books that you’ve downloaded? Your Kindle books are protected with something called Digital Rights Management (DRM). These are put on the eBooks by Amazon in order to protect against piracy and control consumer action.
Of course, this rubs a lot of people up the wrong way. People believe that they’ve paid for their product, so if they want to keep a copy of it on another device then they should be able to. This guide will show you how to remove the DRM from your purchased eBooks and then make backup copies.
Firstly, visit Apprentice Alf's DRM removal website and download the latest release of the tool. Secondly, download Calibre eBook Manager.
Load up Calibre, click ‘Preferences’ and select ‘Change calibre behavior’ (the same action can be performed with CTRL+P). Scroll to the ‘Advanced’ section and then click on ‘Plugins’. From here, click ‘Load plugin from file’. You should now browse to one of the files that you downloaded from Apprentice Alf’s DRM pack. This file is ‘DeDRM_plugin.zip’, located within the ‘DeDRM_calibre_plugin’ folder. You will get a warning about third-party plugins, but click ‘OK’ and you’ll get an installation completion message.
Check that DeDRM appears in the ‘File type plugins’ list and then click ‘Apply’ in the top left corner. Now restart Calibre.
Now that everything is installed, we can begin to remove the DRM from the eBooks. The installed plugin will remove the DRM from the eBooks when you import them to Calibre. As such, if you already had Calibre installed before reading this guide, you’ll need to remove any current eBooks you had listed and reimport them.
The process is as simple as clicking ‘Import’ in Calibre. To download your eBooks to your computer you can either mount your Kindle as a USB device, use the Kindle for PC application or download them using the ‘Actions’ menu in the ‘Manage My Kindle’ section of your Amazon account. Out of those, the Kindle for PC app is probably the best due to its ease of use.
Although all the files might have odd names, don’t worry: any meta data, like title and author name, are stored in the file itself. Select all the files and import them into Calibre. The program will remove the DRM. If you want, you can convert the eBooks to any format of your choice.
Bear in mind that if you’re trying to remove the DRM of Kindle books that you don’t own them Calibre will refuse.
Once the DRM has been removed, you can then move these eBooks to anywhere that you want. An external hard drive, for example, provides a simple backup device to store your data on. After following this guide it’ll mean that even if Amazon shuts down or you lose access to your account, all your eBooks will still be intact and ready to read on any device.