From a user perspective, what matters is “What successful backups are available for me to do a restore from”. Ideally, the summary page would also indicate the status any scheduled task (eg make it clear that a task has failed). I would suggest that any error is broadcast to the main Roon GUI, just like updates, so users are proactively informed.
The “Find Backups” button is not optimal, because it forces the user to a) select the correct share and b) migrate to the correct folder location. It would be better, perhaps, to list the backups that Roon already knows about, in reverse date order (however created), and to (perhaps) offer a “Select alternative location” to allow the user to ask Roon to look in another place. This would allow the user to directly select the appropriate restore point in a more straight forward process.
The “Find Backups” button is confusing IMO. Most people assume that that it is the way to review the list of successful backups (aka the Backup Manager), but in fact the Backup Manager hides in the Scheduled Backups screen as one of the menu options in the “3 dots” menu (the “Clean/Restore” option).
The purpose of the “Find Backups” button, I think it has been said somewhere in the forum, is apparently for use when setting up a new instance of Roon to import an existing Roon database and configuration…
I always use the “Find Backups” button. The backup manager in the Schedules Backups screen only looks at scheduled backups (quelle surprise). I make numerous manual backups when I’m doing metadata editing of my albums and want a very recent backup in case I make a mess of things.
I’m with @noris on this.
Well, that’s very odd, because on my system it shows both scheduled and manual backups. The example below has a manual backup that i made a few days ago highlighted in red.
Hmm. Do you have your scheduled backups and manual backups in the same location? I don’t. I always assumed that it would mess up the maximum backup count if I did that.
Yes, I do… Using the “Backup Now” does not seem to affect the backup count. If I do a “Force Backup Now” from within the Scheduled Backups section, then it will delete the oldest backup to keep within the maximum backup count. However, using “Backup Now”, and the same location for scheduled backups seems to just add it in. Next step is to check what happens when the next Scheduled Backup runs - will it ignore the backups taken via the “Backup Now” route…
And if something goes wrong with a backup, then I get a red warning triangle icon appearing next to the Bookmark icon at the top right of the Roon screen…
And that’s why I use common location(s)… In fact, the Backup Manager is also able to list backups (grouped by Core) from different Cores running on the network if they all write to the same main backup folder location…
Sorry Geoff, am I misunderstanding? I want to write my manual backups to a different location from scheduled, but i want the backup manager to see both.
Thanks @Geoff_Coupe and @BrianW for your comments. I started the thread because in my case the scheduled backups were not in fact accessible by the Roon GUI. But, I also hope that Roon considers improving the backup interface by consolidating the view of available backups and simplifying the methods to initiate backups.
Another way that the GUI could be organized is via backup location. Very roughly, it could look like this:
Funny thing: seems like I experienced the same as @Nathan_Wilkes - scheduled backups were successful but if I browsed the respective backup folder Roon only listed a manual backup. Reading through this thread didn’t really help to actually locate the scheduled backups so I had to check the folder where the backups should have went - and surprise, surprise: they were there but Roon couldn’t see them. Why? Hmm. A few forced and manual backup cycles later I now know – or do believe to do so.
The scenario which led to the problem:
I’ve created a scheduled backup selecting an emptymy-backup-folder as the target via the respective “Scheduled Backups” dialog.
Afterwards I did a manual backup via the “Backup Now” dialog selecting the my-backup-folder from above as a target.
I forgot about this until seeing this thread.
The problem: the “Backup Now” function creates a RoonBackups folder under the selected target my-backup-folder and transfers the manual backup there - at least if the target folder is still empty. The scheduled backup uses the my-backup-folderone level aboveRoonBackups. But Roon cannot browse “nested” backup folders. Seems it only takes the lowest level _roon_backup_root_ it finds when browsing a backup folder so effectively the scheduled backups a _roon_backup_root_ above were hidden and not browseable.
The question @noris is now if this could be circumvented somehow? If a target folder for “Backup Now” was selected why does Roon create another folder below it for it’s backup when it doesn’t for “Scheduled Backups”? Or why doesn’t the scheduler look if there’s an existing _roon_backup_root_ under its target folder (just in case) - even so I think that’s more problematic than not creating the RoonBackups folder.
I wanted to jump in here and respond to a few things.
First, I wanted to say that we genuinely appreciate the great feedback you are all providing here (@Nathan_Wilkes, @Geoff_Coupe, @BrianW). I would recommend also posting your suggestion in the 'feature request" section of the site. Our product team and developers keep a close eye on that category, so that’s definitely the best place to propose a change like this and get feedback from the Community. I think this would be a great discussion to continue having there.
Next, I wanted to thank you, @Nathan_Wilkes, for performing the test that was suggested by @noris. Please keep us update and let us know how things go when the next backup is generated!
@anon47919701, I wanted to thank you for the additional insight here as well. The team has tried to replicate this behavior but was unable to, so I was hoping to get a little more information from you that should help in our investigation.
First, can you give us a little more information about your setup? What kind of Core machine are you using? Where are the backups being stored?
Additionally, is this something that always occurs for you? Can you try reproducing this behavior described once more in a freshly created folder and see if this still occurs?
Latest (published) ROCK running on a NUC7I3BNK. Backups are scheduled to
a direct attached USB HDD and
a dedicated NAS share.
As for reproducing the issue - good thing you’ve asked. At first I couldn’t reproduce it either until I found out what I must have done. Instead of
I seem to have just changed the target folder of an already existing schedule (I guess after I moved my core from the Mac to a dedicated NUC) to a new empty folder.
The upper entry is a schedule where I changed the folder. The lower one would be a newly created schedule where indeed also a RoonBackups folder got created.
Does my explanation makes sense? I now think the issue is that when an existing schedule gets a new directory appointed a new RoonBackups folder should get created too if there’s none to be found. (?)
I’ve passed your information along to the team to do some further investigation. I’ll be sure to keep this thread updated as any news becomes available.
