Did ROCK really corrupt my entire library? [resolved: no, it did not]

I think it’s ok, it’s pretty new anyway. I didn’t realize it would matter which way I shut it down but I will definitely do that in the future.

Maybe I have been doing it wrong but I have always just powered my Nuc down by its power button and it has a 4tb usb hdd attached to it.
Nothing has ever happened, maybe I have been lucky?

It’s more likely that I’m unlucky, as I’m still recovering from a drive crash that wrecked my collection from 5 years ago. Anyway this has made a backup of the music files themselves a high priority.

I too at one time had something corrupt develop in my database. Turns out the corruption also was in all my backups so I was screwed and had to start over and reload. Taught me a hard lesson. I now have 2 backup process set in Roon:

  1. my regular backup that happens other day and I keep 15 of them so this covers a month.
  2. an additional backup that happens monthly and I keep a year’s worth of them.

With this process if I ever find have a corrupt database, since I can go back as far as a year, I know I can find a backup that isn’t corrupt to restore.

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I complain about that every chance I get. It seems to fall on deaf ears.

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Yep, Roon should not backup a corrupt database, makes no sense whatsoever. Presumably it cannot detect corruption until it is too late, otherwise why proceed with a backup it cannot usefully restore?

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If you send Roon support logs they can diagnose corruption easily enough.

The axe I continue and will continue to grind -

Indeed.

Roon couldn’t figure out my corruption issue…

Are you saying Roon didn’t see evidence of corruption in the logs you sent then?
If so, how do you know corruption was the problem, other than the fact that you couldn’t restore?

Yes, there may be cases where corruption can’t be determined, but often the word ‘corruption’ is right in the logs. Probably there are other less obvious cases of corruption that someone with knowledge about Roon’s black boxes could also recognize.

As it stands now, Roon doesn’t even try. Which, as relates to a key component of the Roon eco-system, is inexcusable.

I don’t mean to imply that Roon can determine the cause of a corruption, or fix it once it is found.

As long as you don’t hold the button, there should be no problem.

My symptom was Roon wouldn’t start – it just hung. They asked me to remove a track that they said had bad meta data (that was provided by one of their suppliers) that they thought was causing the corruption. I did but it didn’t fix it. And reloading from backups resulted in the same issue. They were stumped after that. So I just did a rebuild from scratch and that fixed it. Hard to conceive it was anything other than a corrupt database.

That’s exactly how I do it, one quick press and same to restart.
No issue ever…touch wood!

Yeah, I’ve had to rebuild from scratch also and because of corruption.

Your unfortunate experience doesn’t change my point. Roon needs to do all it can to ensure the integrity of its key component, it’s library.

What separates the adult coders from the children is anticipating unexpected problems and coding to them…

Of course agree…

I definitely pushed and held the button because that’s what I used to do with my PC. Lesson learned!

While I’m not pleased that I had to reimport my entire library, I would rather have to do that than to re-rip and redownload (Qobuz etc) everything again. And some of it is from HDTracks (from when Qobuz wasn’t available here) or Analog Productions, that stuff can’t be redownloaded.

Latest update: had to start over completely again because of the same corrupt file issue. This time I won’t do anything with database backups, but if this happens once more I’ll probably abandon ROCK.

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Just a question to help me get a better picture of things in my head…

  • Are a majority of the people using ROCK storing their files in some default location on the internal drive that the ROCK and the database are on?

or…

  • Are are you keeping you’re files in a separate location outside of the ROCK machine?

I would never do the first one…

Not only should you never do the first option, but Roon Labs explicitly tell everyone not to do it in the ROCK page:

The SSD can not be used for music content.
If you want music content in this device, use another disk (see below about “internal storage”).

Needless to say, some will ignore this guidance. On their own heads be it, say I.

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4tb USB HDD attached to the nuc/rock
so definitely outside…

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Mine is also external USB, it’s the same drive I was using with Roon on Windows before.

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OK, final update on this. A third day, and a third time having to reset completely to get music to play. I think my usb drive is powering down (probably by design) so I’m going to try using a nas instead. Hoping that works better.