I’m considering a quiet Nucleus with internal SSD music storage to replace my somewhat noisy Synology NAS+NUC music storage+Roon server setup. However, I have not found a really satisfactory backup method reading through earlier discussions of Nucleus backups. In my current setup, I backup the Roon database on the NAS, and then backup both that and the NAS-stored music (>1TB) on external USB drives for off-premises storage. In addition, I mirror all digital downloads, for which I have no CDs, to a cloud provider. All of this is made pretty easy with the Synology backup software. The only suggestions I’ve found here are to use an external computer (in my case, a Mac) to do the backups. I trust a very nice Mac backup app, ChronoSync, which I’ve used for a long time, but unfortunately I don’t trust the speed or reliability of Mac or Linux SMB implementations. I fear that running backups over SMB from my Mac will be frustrating and unreliable.
Ideally, the Nucleus would have a means of mirroring both the Roon database and any internally-stored music on a USB-mounted drive. Something like a Web GUI wrapper for rsync. Is there a chance of that being possible?
When I was running a NUC/ROCK with external disk, I had Roon make its database backups to it as well, with the Synology making a backup of the entire disk over SMB (Active Server Backup package). (Internal storage does work differently on ROCK and should not be used for backups). My collection is slightly under 1TB as well and the nightly backups have been speedy and flawless.
As for backing up to an external disk on the Nucleus directly: this is possible for the database. There have been a few requests for direct music backup in the same vein – as the same goes for ROCK, I think this calls for a ‘formal’ Feature Request.
PS: Great to see you around these premises again. I hope you’re doing reasonably well.
Thanks, I’ll put in the “formal” feature request on the right thread. I’m doing well, just been busy with other things and not posting here as much for a while.
I’ve been told by Roon support that you shouldn’t run scheduled database backups to the internal drive. The internal drive should only be used for music files.
Better to run the scheduled database backups to an external USB3 SDD/flash/hard drive, to a NAS, or somewhere else on your network.
You’re absolutely right, @Lloyd_Borrett. I’ve read the little exchange you had with @mike and I have amended my original post a bit as not to confuse future readers. Thanks for following up here!
I use a 128 Gb USB stick for Roon database backups. I just stick it in to the Server and tell Roon to back up to it every 3 days. When it gets full I delete the earliest 10 or so and keep on going.
I prefer to tell Roon to do a scheduled backup every day and to keep 60 sets of the backup. Then I don’t have to worry about removing old backups and running out of room.
I back up the roon db to a nas every two days and keep 10 versions (if you worry about noise from the NAS, just put it in another room than your stereo). I then put a shell script on the nas to zip the backup files and put them on a share that’s auto-synced to a second NAS that’s offsite. OK, so a little paranoid, but f my home burns to the ground, I can get roon up and running fast with all my music;)
As far as the music library goes, I sync it live with Dropbox AND the secondary backup location as well.
Disk is relatively cheap, and I just happened to have a couple of decent spec Synology NAS on my hands.
After I migrated from Asset to Roon, Roon found that a couple of files in my library were corrupted, but re-downloading those from Dropbox took care of that. Absolutely Love the Inspector / Corrupt feature in Roon
