Backing up my Roon does it include my music files?

Core Machine

Dell All in One Desktop PC
Apple iPad

Network Details

Audio Devices

Library Size

Description of Issue

I need to know info regarding backing up. When I use Roon as my backup from my Roon setting, is it going to back up my entire music files that are on my PC or just the music I have on my Roon app?

There was a lot of music that was initially downloaded and then, I went and selected only the artists, songs, LPs that I wanted, along with eliminating duplicates and fixing artwork and I now have a clean Roon library on my Apple iPad.

I don’t want to have to do this again as it took 6-8 hrs to complete. I have all of my music on my Dell all in one PC and I then use my Apple iPad to play my music.

Thanks Frederick

Roon does not back up your local music files. Your Roon program core is not on your iPad. It is on a computer device of some sort. That is where your Roon data is located. Your Roon backup is wherever you directed it to, but not on an iPad. An iPad is merely a control device, connected by WIFI to your core.

Is there a way I can have roon use my roon file on my iPad as my back up file?

No. Plug a USB HDD into your computer and do nightly automatic backups to that. Works perfectly.

I set Roon to backup my stuff. I checked
occasionally to see that it was indeed backing things up. I could see something being backed up, but its just computer speak, so Icould never tell what it was. I could see, however that something backed up and when the next backup would be.

a few weeks ago, I got a message that Roon could not find my database. It said, not to worry, just come to this site and someone would fix it. so far nothing. I assumed Roon would help, but nothing. so, now, I’m not sure what happened to my backups and , now Roon says that I have none. and none scheduled.

my music was backed up before Roon, so I still have that, but everything since Roon, including all my playlists are gone as if they never existed. it will take me a month or more every night to remake the playlists. Sadly, I have the playlists saved in JRiver, but even though Roon shows how to import them, I cannot get them to import, and again I have a yhread asking for help, but none so far.

so backup all you want, but know that it may not really work and theres nothing you can do about it if an upgrade decides to remove your stuff

Roon only backs up the database (which contains " information about the music you love. In addition to your library’s metadata, it also contains any edits you’ve made, your play history, all of your Roon playlists, your favorites, your settings, and more").

Check here for more info: https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/backup#How_do_Roon_backups_work

Loosing this “backup” should not affect your music library. It would only mean that the settings and changes you made to or within Roon are lost with the backup. Also, note that you should NOT use any “Watched folders” as the back-up location as Roon will try to scan the back-up and could cause issues.

For the files on your iPad, You can tell Roon where the watched folders are and then enable and disable different watched folder, however this would also make the database need to be updated every time you do this and could get messy or cause issues. I also do not know enough about the iPad to know if you can actually see the storage location in Roon to be able to add it as a watched folder. Maybe someone with more knowledge of the iPad can chime in.