# Best way to back-up? and what size HD? **URL:** \ **Category:** ROCK\ **Created:** [May 9, 2023, 10:38pm UTC](https://community.roonlabs.com/t/best-way-to-back-up-and-what-size-hd/242226 "2023-05-09T22:38:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 5
**Author:** ![David\_Snyder](https://community.roonlabs.com/user_avatar/community.roonlabs.com/david_snyder/32/102380_2.png) [@David\_Snyder](https://community.roonlabs.com/u/David_Snyder)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2023, 11:56pm UTC](https://community.roonlabs.com/t/best-way-to-back-up-and-what-size-hd/242226/5 "2023-05-09T23:56:26Z")
> [@Olivier\_Lengwiler](#): > > - Will the actual music also be backed up? The answer depends on where you store your (local) music today. You didn’t say if you have internal storage for music files or if you’re using an external USB drive or a NAS. > [@Olivier\_Lengwiler](#): > > Is the back-up full size or is it compressed, and my be the music has only partially to be saved on a HD. The answer depends on your choice of file format but most people use FLAC or similar lossless compression. If that’s you, the music files are already compressed. You will generally not be able to compress them further. I don’t understand that last bit about partially saving the music. If it were me, I’d want a full backup, but I guess you could exclude certain folders or files if you really don’t care about them. Although, if that’s the case, I’d just delete them now rather than waiting for a storage failure to lose them. Here’s a post I wrote a couple of years ago that discusses one approach to backing up music files that are on internal storage. > [@Backing up to hard disk](https://community.roonlabs.com/t/backing-up-to-hard-disk/167107/6): > > Edit: in this post, I’m assuming that you have an internal SSD drive in the NUC that you’re using for ROCK and you want to backup your music files to an external USB drive. Others above have described how to backup your Roon database to an attached thumb or USB drive. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell Roon OS to “sync” the music files that you have on an internal SATA SSD to an external USB drive. And, there’s no SSH access for you to login and run rsync to do a backup manually. However, … **Edit:** as @Jim_F pointed out, a backup initiated (or scheduled) from within Roon will not backup your local music library. I had assumed that your question was more general in nature rather than relating specifically to Roon’s backup feature. As others have said, Roon’s backup feature only covers the database. --- _[View the full topic](https://community.roonlabs.com/t/best-way-to-back-up-and-what-size-hd/242226)._