I abandoned it pretty quickly. I don’t think they have UK servers (or if so they’re not up to task). Even with a few live support helps and settings tweaks, I couldn’t get a decent, consistent upload speed.
I ended up with the Amazon Cloud which has a decent speed but sadly a pathetic interface so requires rclone or other syncing method. Still, its considerably cheaper too if you;re happy with the very manual/scripted approach.
Speed aside, crash plan was the best feature set I found and really wanted it to work.
Here’s what I do after much experimentation: My music library (+/- 700G) is on a Samsung 3.1 USB SSD. (My Roon Core is on a Mac Mini.) . Backups are with Time Machine, and I also regularly back up the database to my Synology NAS. I had tried using the NAS as the Roon library directly, but encountered hassles with needing to rescan in order for Roon to see new files, and sputtering playback (probably cause by my less-than-perfect internet service.)
Not sure whether their service has improved but I tried CP about 3-4 years ago and it was unimaginably terrible. Literally, months to back up, difficulty with managing backups and restoring etc. I can’t remember exactly the problem but it had something to do with servers in various locations being hammered and being unable to move the original backup to a less busy server without deleting and starting again…cue another 4 months of pain. It put me off cloud storage and I ended up buying 2 x nas boxes and sticking them in different locations, one backing up the other. With the amount of space that I need this made more sense than paying for AWS or similar.
At that rate I’d consider altering my will to leave directions to my executor about completing a backup !
Edit: Roon has some internal backup features in the works, including Dropbox. I wouldn’t advise anyone to buy any new backup capability until they’ve checked out 1.3.
There’s gotta be a better/faster way. Thanks for sharing this.
Seems like there would be a business model - perhaps at a UPS or FedEx store - that would have mega-upload speeds and we could carry in a hard drive for the initial backup. Leave it overnight and pick up the next day.
I’ve read about services that one can send a drive for backup so I guess that’s a Plan B.
But 3 months to back up to the cloud?
Maybe an audio-buddy backup VPN? Get a local friend to host your backup, deliver the populated drive to him, and just do incremental backups via VPN to your drive at his house and his drive at your house.
hi guys, I’m hesitating between an external USB3 SSD portable drive like a Transcend ESD400 (or Samsung T3) or going for an external case with a good SATA drive. Any advice? will it make a big difference from a SQ if I go either way?
thanks!
If the drive is to store music, I will say that there is no difference in SQ. For me SSD is a bit too costly to store a reasonable size library, so I have USB3 portable HDD for my local storage (expanding the internal storage in the computer). If mechanical noise is going to be an issue then SSD is silent. I negate the noise issue by keeping the computer in a separate room from where the speakers are playing.
No I did not, but I can think of no rational basis for arguing that SSD ‘sounds better’ than files stored on SATA drives or USB3 drives. I would concede that storing on SSD may have some advantages (such as speed of operation and silence) but SQ would not be listed along with those advantages. As I have already said the overwhelming disadvantage of SSD for me personally is the cost.
Hi Miles,
I have read about different types of storage device affecting SQ where there is a direct connection between the computer and the DAC, I understand SSD is preferred with an isolated power supply by enthusiasts and depending on how enthusiastic you are you can pay what you like to clean up the noisy computer.
I prefer to overcome all of those issues by using a thin client Ethernet renderer (in my case a microRendu) that runs RoonReady (or an HQP NAA). A small computing device running RoonBridge uses the same concept. This presents a very clean USB signal to the DAC leaving behind all the noise and latency issues of the general purpose computer.
I have both a 6TB HDD and a 1TB SSD on my music server with different types of music on each (Classical and Jazz on the HDD, Rock and Other Jazz on SSD). I can’t detect any difference in SQ between them. There can be a very slight delay as the HDD spins up if it has gone to sleep since last accessed. Otherwise I don’t notice any difference between storage locations.
I’m not seeing which NAS the original poster was using. I have a Synology 916+ with 8GB of ram and a quad core Pentium N3710 1.6 with burst to 2.56ghz.
If that can’t run my puny 18,000 tracks something is wrong.
I haven’t set up Roon on mine yet but a friend of mine has this same setup with 3 times as many tracks and no issues.
I play FLAC files from the NAS, Tidal, and iTunes via Roon on my Mac right now.
NAS has a lot of benefits beyond just backups but they are great at backups, dealing with failed disks, running all sorts of apps, etc. They are a long way from an old or obsolete technology.
I don’t mind having an additional cloud backup and do for some things but it would be a huge mistake to depend solely on cloud. I’m an IT Enterprise Architect working mostly in the financial industry and have done many massive global scale cloud architecture designs some I’m pretty familiar with cloud of all sorts.
If I can make one device do two things thats great even though I do see the appeal of NUC’s etc.
Same here. I was using a direct connection to my DAC for a while, but am now using an Allo DigiOne on a Pi. SQ has never been better, and I can leave the server plugged in in another room and not worry about that side of things: power supply, disks, ethernet cables and filters, USB cables, etc…
