I have zero backups
That’s OK if you don’t assign any value to your data and are happy to start from scratch in the event of a fault.
Otherwise it is something that you might want to address.
Thanks for this
I have to admit, being fairly new to Roon, I have so far not specifically done any backups of the database. Perhaps because I have comparatively few playlists and uncomplicated setups I didn’t see the point. When I set up Roon, it took Roon a while (don’t know exactly how long… maybe an hour?) to fully integrate my (about +100,000 tracks or so) library (all in a folder "music/ALAC… the music library itself is of course backed up), but that’s that…so what’s the worst that could ever happen if the library gets corrupted? Okay, I’d have to do all the manual fiddling over again I did (correctly identify the “unidentified” albums, though that were not that many that it would give me headaches). Also, so far Roon itself runs smoothly, and its first upddate went smoothly as well, but I’ve been warned that updates may cause trouble. Perhaps I should make a backup.
You lose all you play history, Roon playlists, tags, album merges, Roon favorites, metadata edits, bans, and everything else that isn’t stored in local file tags or online metadata.
Depending on how someone uses Roon, this can mean nothing of consequence or it can mean years of work.
Yeah, I can see why that matters. I have only about a dozen playlists or so (curated separately from Roon), and some metadata edits, but nothing I can’t restore rather quickly.
But as I said, I have comparatively few playlists, and if I had to completely re-install my library tomorrow, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But I understand how it would be if you have fine tuned thousands of things over the years. I would back up my library if it every reaches a point where I think it would be a lot of work to restore it.
Your play history, on the other hand, can never be replicated. If that doesn’t matter, then backups probably are less useful to you overall.
I have a different solution which I have used successfully for years and may be another way to go.
I make an exact image of the main Music files drive which stores my music files (4 terrabytes) to 2 seperate drives. one Internal drive and one external usb drive as follows:
Each alternate day I copy the Music Drive to the Internal Drive and the then the following day to the External Drive
2 seperate and unrelated copies in case the main drive is corrupted when the copy is scheduled and copies unfortunately as a corrupted drive.
Then you at least have yesterday’s copy which is uncorrupted.
I use SSD drives but HDD are fine since your storage is relatively small.
Their are costs associated with this approach. 2 extra Drives with sufficient capacity to allow for growth. A software programme to do the copies.
Once the initial copy is completed the subsequent copies are a few seconds or minutes, as the software is intelligent and only copies the changes. Initial copy depending on Drive speed could be a few hours.
Hope this gives you another solution since I know how costly the “Cloud” can be.
Software I happen to use is CASPER by Future Sytems Solutions. I’m sure there are many other software products, but I have stayed with this with no problems.
Of course you also constantly need backup of your Boot (C:) drive which holds all your ROON data. Casper has this covered too.