I am currently maintaining a pair of Roon music systems. At home I have my music in a share on a NAS. At work I’ve replicated the collection on an external USB drive. Ideally I’d like to have my collection in a single place. Is it possible to store a music collection on a cloud-based folder? If that works well enough then I’d be able to point each Roon setup at that single source for my music.
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You could use something like this
Although, even with a moderate music library, it will not be cheap.
If you use Office 365, then you have 1TB cloud storage available. You could use some of that to set up a single source for at least part of your music library? Point each Roon system to the local OneDrive music folder that is kept in sync with the OneDrive cloud.
By default, this would be of the form C:\Users\your username\OneDrive\Music on each Roon system.
Just remember One Drive has a 1TB limit but also a 20,000 files limit
I believe that number of files limitation has been removed with the current version of the OneDrive sync client in Windows 10. See: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Video-Take-advantage-of-the-new-OneDrive-Sync-Client-b17f764f-7dc6-4b34-91b4-0698c87619c7
I note that on one of my devices I am currently syncing over 27,000 files, and my OneDrive cloud has well over 100,000 files in it.
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Having a single cloud-based source is not a backup for your music. I have two separate NAS located in different places to ensure I have a back up available.
For a really large collection I think that’s as cost effective as I’ve been able to find, as I also have to consider how long it would take to restore a large collection from a cloud-based solution.
I never said it was a “backup for your music” - I was suggesting it as a possible solution to providing a single source of music to multiple Roon systems. Also, the OneDrive approach gives continuous automatic syncing of local copies, so “time to restore a large collection from a cloud-based solution” is somewhat irrelevant.
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I will look into SoftNAS. I could also consider deploying an SMB server on AWS. I need to compare the costs for a DIY solution. I’m looking at 8TB or so of storage.
It is a great option and in my view probably a better back up option than my Synology NAS server as I imagine Microsoft would have a better system in place for recovery of files than I do.
I am not looking at this as a backup solution. I have that in place several times over. My goal is for a single file source that I can access from different roon systems on different networks so I don’t need to keep two libraries in synch.
I am actually thinking of changing the source from my Synology NAS server to OneDrive with the passage of time - I think the latter is probably more robust solution relying upon Microsoft’s internal controls than my infrastructure. In the interim I am using both (am storing new music on OneDrive rather than my NAS) as a source (including of course with Tidal integration). No issues to date.
Cloud based storage might work for some but in countries like Australia where there are bandwidth caps on internet services and significant data rate restrictions too this is not going to fly.
Likewise for mobile use when and if it comes to Roon the same situation applies perhaps more so as mobile services typically have much tighter restrictions on both speed and data allowances.
Disk space is cheap these days with 8-10TB drives in the market at pretty good prices. That’s a lot of music space even for hires formats.
No restrictions here in Birchgrove, Sydney.
Perhaps a better strategy is to use local storage for the bulk of the library and cloud storage for updates to that base. From time to time I could synchronize the local copies. That way the use of cloud storage is more attenuated but I could choose when I want to synchronize the local copies.
Can the core be configured to source music files from a cloud based storage provider?
Provided Roon can see the cloud folder in the Storage browser and you’ve got adequate bandwidth I don’t see why not.
Mounting a cloud location as a network folder will vary according to your OS and may require an IP address for the cloud folder. See here for general guidance about adding a NAS which would is similar, but local.
Here’s a video about mapping a network storage location to a local drive in Windows.
I’m running ROCK and understand that any SMB based share could work. Are we limited to SMB based shares? If that will rule out any cloud based provider that doesn’t offer SMB access. I’m NOT talking about services like DropBox or Microsoft drive that will synch to a local drive. I’m talking about pure cloud access.
Thanks for this Jeff , really appreciated . Sounds like we have similar size collections . I have it split over multiple folders but all my bought CD’s are in a folder with over 28.000 files which has always been the problem. Will give this a try tomorrow
Cheers
Terry Smith
ROCK storage refers only to SMB. I understand there are SMB (Server Message Block) cloud storage solutions, but there are also a lot of references to SMB meaning Small/Medium Business in cloud storage searches.
The main issue I can see is that I don’t think ROCK has the Internet networking tools that would enable it to communicate with a cloud SMB server. You’d need a general purpose OS for that.
A very good cloud service is Jottacloud.
It will for sure sync files across all your devices in the sync folder.
Jottacloud can do backup as well, but that you didn’t need.
You will need to use a PC to synchronize files.
However that PC can of cause point to a NAS. So the PC is only a “tool”, the NAS is where storage is. Or any disk for that matter.
So even a USB disk to your ROCK should be able to sync 
How big is your collection?
You get 5GB free. Unlimited is around $99 a year.
Roon doesn’t support pure cloud access yet. That may change.