iMac M1 - 16GB
Music library on LaCie 10TB drive, 8TB partition. (2TB for Time Machine)
Networking Gear & Setup Details
Fiber, ethernet to iMac, no VPN
Connected Audio Devices
Oppo UDP-205, iMac
Number of Tracks in Library
156k tracks
Description of Issue
The backups for ROON are growing to very large sizes. This week the grew by 20GB even though the library did not increase in size.
The back up is 324 GB and is incomplete as the backup used the rest of the disk and then failed to complete.
The Roon folder under Library is 81.52 GB.
Current setup is every 4 days with 3 backups kept.
So how does an incremental backup for 3 periods get from 82GB to 324GB? Just 3 copies would be 3*82 = 246 GB. Incremental should be more efficient and less than 246, yet ROON back up is consuming 324GB. Something is not adding up.
Canât explain the backup size. But please note that Roon backups ARE NOT INCREMENTAL. Each backup includes the whole library. This is why a restore always overwite your whole library, and why you cannot restore just a part of it.
Incremental backups just means that unchanged database files are not backed up as a new copy every single time, only the changes are, and automatic Roon backups are definitely incremental in that sense.
You can restore a backup from a specific time stamp.
That doesnât mean that itâs possible to restore only parts of it.
That said, something seems off for @John_Kustak1 and no idea whatâs going on
Every database file is backed up when you execute a backup. I do not think you are using the word âincrementalâ in the standard sense used in all backup softwares.
I cleared up 60GB on the drive. I added nothing to my Roon library. Roon back up took all the space and then failed. It now stands at 385GB.
As you can see in the screen shot the Roon library is unchanged. This is not the behavior of an incremental back up.
Iâm sure my DB is much smaller than yours: 3465 albums (about 1000 local with tags, 2000 Qobuz, rest Tidal), 44852 tracks, and my library is on ROCK, so I canât get to the library folder size, but hereâs how it looks for me:
Keep 50 automatic backups, every 3 days to the NAS.
Occasionally I perform a manual fresh one into a separate folder on the NAS, so these are definitely full backups.
Sizes:
My last full, manual NAS backup from July 23 has a size of 1.78 GB. Older ones have similar sizes and growing slowly every time as I add content / edit metadata. (The very first one I have is 1.5 years old and 1.44 GB)
My automatic NAS backup folder, holding 50 backups, has a size of 39.6 GB. If it was a full backup every time, it should be 50 x ~1.44-1.78 GB â 80 GB.
Now, I donât know how many files change in the Roon DB when making library changes. Clearly itâs not just a few files, as the full backup is only twice the size of 50 increments. However, I did make some large-scale changes over recent months, and itâs clearly not a full backup every time, either.
With your backups being about 30 times the size of mine, I canât really comprehend how massive your library must be. And maybe there are so many cross-references (which must grow with some kind of power function and not linearly with library size), that most of your database gets touched frequently. but that said, the behavior you see does look somewhat odd to me.
Backup ran out of disc space again. Deleted all backups, recovered 383GB.
While deleting each one I monitored the size. With all deleted there was still 163GB used in the Roon backup folder. I deleted the content to get to zero and we shall see what the next backups do.
According to your screenshot here, it looks like your backups are located on the JAK Big â Music drive:
I also see that youâve added your entire drive as a Roon Watched storage location: mounted:/Volumes/JAK Big
I suspect the issue here is the one that @Geoff_Coupe initially pointed out, it looks like you are asking Roon to perform a backup and including a watched storage location that already contains a Roon backup directory inside of it.
I would advise on putting the Roon Backup folder somewhere Roon is not watching, you can either do this by adding the Music folder by itself and not the entire drive. You should disable the current storage location before adding the Music subfolder, so that metadata edits are preserved.
Your assumption is wrong. The backup folder is not contained within any of the scanned content folders.
The âfixâ was to completely delete the backups. For whatever reason the older backkups were under previous roon versions and they just werenât working. Once I deleted everything, the back up size is not only close to the library size, the incremental âfeatureâ of the backup is working and both iterations sum to close to the library size.
