The only thing that I would ask and you have not covered are:
Common Mode Failures. For example, is there a chance that a significant event (fire, flood , and, if the backup storage devices are all permanently plugged in and powered on and unprotected, lightning strikes come to mind) could destroy all of them. This leads into:
‘offsite copies’. For ultimate backup reliability, this is important to consider although, again, whether or not it warrants the cost and/or effort of maintaining such an offsite backup copy is up to the individual who must weigh the cost of maintaining an offsite backup (in financial and effort terms) against the cost of a total loss of the Roon Database (and anything else, not necessarily Roon related, which may be important).
I would like to ask another question of people at large:
How often do you test your backups? I periodically restore backups to a temporary Roon Server running on my laptop (thus leaving my main Roon Server undisturbed) in order to test mine. To my mind, this is as important as performing the backup itself. There is no point in having a backup if it can’t be used and, for anything other than basic file backups, the only sure way to be sure that a backup can be used to restore a system - is to use it to restore a system.
This is probably an unwelcome reply but here goes. I don’t bother with backups and not sure why I need to. I have no owned music and don’t make playlists. Only use playlists from Qobuz and Tidal. Have a combined favorites library of about 1500 albums. Don’t save tracks. “Something Box” keeps telling me I’ve run out capacity. So what. My backups are really at Qobuz and Tidal. Am I missing something?
Sure. There is nothing unwelcome about it. It simply depends on how you use Roon. If there is nothing in your library that you deem worth saving, then you don’t need backups. However, if you you want to preserve personal things in the Roon library, then you do.
Examples (any most of this applies to streaming content as well):
Edited credits.
Album merges.
Hidden albums/tracks.
Banned albums/tracks/artists.
Cover images, artist images.
Changes to album/track titles or artist names.
Artist name sort order.
Changes to the genres assigned to albums or artists.
Changes to the genre hierarchy and personal genre additions.
Thanks for the comprehensive reply.
I’m general, if it isn’t saved in my Qobuz/Tidal accounts feeding Roon, I probably don’t need it. Unlike many here, despite a lifetime collection of a few hundred LPs and even more CD/SACDs, I really don’t collect music. These streamer websites with their millions of selections, provide me plenty of music. Sometimes, selections I like disappear but I’m usually able to find them again on another service. Many times it’s being replaced by an updated, higher res version. For me, music is the continual discovery of albums I haven’t heard. My collections of physical and virtual music in streamer libraries largely seem seldom to be played. I have a continual backlog of music to be heard in Roon’s play later department.
Sorry to bore everyone with my practice, but life is good here in front of my stereo.
Best and good listening to everyone.
That’s fine, but it’s really a separate thing and obviously this topic is irrelevant for you. But it’s not irrelevant for others with different ways of using Roon.
Totally agree… and that’s the reason I apologized at the beginning. But everyone’s responses were helpful to me and have confirmed that I don’t need to buy more backup space from that utility. Thanks.
Failing to understand why one would keep a years worth of Roon backups(???) It’s not like this is variable mission critical data changing every second, mandatory compliance retention regulated, or someone will hold Roon backups for a ransomware payment.
Ask yourself:
Why would I go back a year to do a system restore?
Was there a critical playlist I deleted and is the year old restore worth loosing all my play history?
Is there a value in restoring last weeks backup when I have one from say yesterday?
One would expect that the recovery would be using the last most recent backup, if that is corrupted, then the previous. Worse case, you go back to your offsite.
Recall:
Every backup is a full backup so you can’t selectively restore anything without wiping everything out and go back to the RPO of the backup.
To answer the OP’s original question:
2 daily backups to two different targets (NAS and local 2nd SSD)
Retain 3 copies
I have had many opportunities to recover my Roon server and all have worked flawlessly so I don’t bother testing my backups on a regular basis. If I did need to go back in time for a backup, I would use my NAS archive backup to get the data.
Edit: Forgot to mention… I have Roon on a VM these days, so a snapshot would be my 1st recovery step, 2nd would be file backup restore.
All your questions have been answered before in this thread. If you read the forum, you will come across cases where users are being told that their library suffered latent corruption in the past and they have to go back to an earlier backup.
And if you are unlucky, the earliest backup that doesn’t have the latent corruption is the one from three years ago, if you still have it.
Keeping them costs zero money and effort, so why not.
I used to have daily backups and keep only a limited set.
Earlier this year I lost all of my database (settings, listening history, album edits etc.) because due to bad memory on my Roon box the database had become silently corrupted in a way that went undetected for long enough for all my backups (including some 1-2 year old one that I had copied offline) were tainted.
So I started afresh, and now I just backup every ~14 days or so (not checking now) but with no limit on retention other than available disk space.
So yeah, see my other comment: I’ve learned that few backups is okay, but I’ll definitely keep them for a few years now that I’ve had to start from scratch due to corruption. (It was a hardware issue, not software induced, but software failed to detect or repair until it was too late and everything started failing)
Ya, I only read half as everyone was saying the same thing… The vendors creeping db corruption issue wouldn’t change my mind or stated opinion. I just don’t assign a high-value target to Roon databases l(or my listening history) like I do to say my Quicken home finance software or Home Assistant electricity historical consumption reports.
…My valuable lists are not created or maintained in Room as Roon is a consumer of exports from my main music DAM. However and I did say that if I needed I could back to my cold storage archive where Roon data just get’s picked up with the rest. So if I really cared, I could go back in time just like everyone else in this thread… Just not hot datasets which are consuming valuable high-speed storage medium. If I could purge Roon history I would but I can’t easily on a ZFS file system.
I have been in the software architecture business for decades… Ya, I am old and most likely grumpy but not today! … be surprised if say an N-5 or older backup could be restored from several releases behind. Perhaps a question for Roon support how much back testing is performed against older database schemas and tables. That would certainly put a pin in it as how long one should maintain a Roon backup dataset.
