Well I have spent today going back and trying to restore backups to no avail. Went back through many backups going back to version 831 in November, and after restoring all end up in the same place - “There was an issue loading your database” error. I then found an older one, version 814 from August last year, and it sort of restores but then the whole application repeatedly crashes.
It seems my only option now is to start from a fresh database and lose all my changes. I can’t even open my music now. I have to say, I am not happy with the whole way this has played out. There were posts going back into December about this issue that I see now, yet there was no warning upon upgrading.
-
I understand that this silent corruption has clearly been happening for a long time - Why? The Mac has been on a UPS 24/7. Why were no database integrity checks done over at least 6 months from 814 until now? I religiously kept scheduled automatic backups going back months for this reason and simply trusted Roon that the backups would be useable. Surely it is clear now that there needs to be some kind of manual database integrity check one can run, or optionally have it run automatically before backing up the database so you aren’t just backing up bad data.
-
If Roon became aware of this issue, why was there no warning or why was the update not pulled until some kind of database repair mechanism could be implemented?
-
If there is “some” corruption in the database, why can’t a new one be rebuilt using the “good” records, after those are individually integrity-checked, and only the “bad” ones omitted from the database and re-added fresh. At least that way you’d only lose changes on the corrupt records, not everything.
-
If I rebuild the database from scratch, won’t all the “date added” metadata all be set to today? What about all the playlists and favorites etc? Is that lost forever?
-
Most importantly… given it has now been demonstrated that silent corruption gets passed through to backups, how can I know that this isn’t ever going to happen again?
I consider this to be a significant failure and will find it difficult to trust this software again. I honestly can’t remember how many changes I made to entries directly in Roon, or to which albums/artists, it’s been over a period of years, but hopefully not too many.
I will say I am damned glad I continued to use a workflow that involved adding all music and making “most” (unfortunately not all) of the changes in iTunes first, which I continued to run in parallel, before it was imported to Roon, therefore most of the metadata changes should be picked up by a fresh database.
I remember people back then saying how ridiculous it was to do it this way and I should just add everything directly in Roon and make changes there because Roon’s database was much more sophisticated and was backed up automatically so you could never lose anything as you could always restore a database backup etc etc. I felt stupid still continuing for years to do most of the editing with iTunes when my playback was all through Roon. I do not feel stupid now… Had I not done it this way I would have had thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of tracks that needed manual editing all over again.
I guess I have no option now but to create a fresh database and add everything from scratch, unless there is some other way…
PS - Thanks for the advice anyway @DaveN, and for your other thread @freejazz