Alternative location for local Roon folder?

[DJb_kbx]

Core Machine (Operating system/System info/Roon build number)

Windows10, latest Roon

Network Details (Including networking gear model/manufacturer and if on WiFi/Ethernet)

not relevant

Audio Devices (Specify what device you’re using and its connection type - USB/HDMI/etc.)

not relevant

Description Of Issue

New user, Roon is currently importing my (substantial) library and I’m running out of space on my system partition. Is there a way to offload C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Roon to another hdd?

[dylan (Dylan Caudill)]

Hi @DJb_kbx,

At this time Roon does not support alternate locations for the database — It will always be located at the path you shared above.

[DJb_kbx]

Thanks for the quick replies.
How much space on C:\etc is needed appx per 10k songs?

[BlackJack]

From FAQ: What are the minimum requirements? one can follow the link to:

Suggested hardware

It feels like the answer to most “will it work?” questions is going to be “It’ll work, but it won’t be as good as it could be”, because lets be honest, no-one is going to wonder whether a Mac Pro works flawlessly or not. I want to expand a little bit more to help you guys understand where the tradeoffs are so you can make good hardware decisions. As we’ve said above, Roon will run on just about anything vaguely recent. How much hardware you need to get an impeccable experience depends on how yo…

Roon is currently importing my (substantial) library and I’m running out of space

… but as you didn’t gave away any real figures, you might also want to read the post about really large libraries:

My experiences with Rock and a 500k+ tracks library

EDIT 4/2018: this post was written in June of 2017, and since then, we’ve made a number of optimazations to Roon. The number that was previously stated as 300k is probably closer to 550k now. First, some context It’s important to clarify: libraries of this size are extremely exceptional, and will always require special care. The group of people with 300k+ track libraries represents a small handful of people amongst our user base. Off the shelf solutions simply do not apply for people in this…

[cwichura]

Is there a way to offload

Officially, no.

Unofficially, yes. Stop Roon. Move the Roon database directory to another drive. Use “mklink /j” to create a junction reparse point from the original location to wherever you moved the Roon database folder to.

[evand]

This works, been there, done that.

[cwichura]

reinstall Roon on your computer

This won’t change anything. Roon on Windows always uses a hardcoded path relative to %APPDATA% for the Roon database.

[cwichura]

What Roon database are you referring to?

The OP was specifically asking about moving Roon’s internal metadata database to a location not on their boot drive. They were not asking about the raw music files, themselves. Roon already lets you have music anywhere you want it. Only the metadata database has a hardcoded path.

[cwichura]

and I’m running out of space on my system partition. Is there a way to offload C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Roon to another hdd?

That’s saying the metadata database is what’s filling up his system drive.

[DJb_kbx]

Thanks for pointing this out. I did a

mklink /J F:\Roon\Database C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Roon\Database

and ended up with what seems two identical …\Roon\Database folders on 2 different drives. Roon is importing, the target directory is growing in size, but available space is still decreasing on C:\
Is this expected behaviour?

[DJb_kbx]

Thanks, very insightful.
my library is in the same ballpark as discussed there

My apologies for not digging around first in the faq and forum, but it was my first Roon day and I had to abort importing, so (I thought) I was in need of a quick fix.

[cwichura]

mklink /J F:\Roon\Database C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Roon\Database

You have the arguments reversed, so you created a junction from F:\Roon\Database that points at the C: drive. You can confirm this by doing a ‘dir’ in a command prompt in F:\Roon. It should show “Database” as type JUNCTION.

So you will need to stop Roon again, delete F:\Roon\Database, again move the origin to F:\Roon\Database (since Roon has been updating the C:\ drive), then run mklink /j with the correct order. Confirm that the C: drive “Database” shows as type JUNCTION. Then restart Roon again.

[DJb_kbx]

Thanks, just figured it out, copying as we speak.
Should have done this AFTER my morning coffee

[Kevin_Owen (FTBoomer)]

I realize this has been resolved but just for reference. This yields 7.12GB on disk for me.