How to backup music files?

I am a new Roon user. Bought a Nucleus in March and I’ve ripped my CD collection. My remotes are an iMac and an iPad.

Although I still have all the CD’s, I would like to backup the music files to an external hard drive, so I do not have to go through the time/effort to rip them again if the drive in the Nucleus crashes. The Roon backup function evidently does not back up the music files. There is an export function but it looks like I would have to individually export each of 900+ CDs. There must be an easier way. Any advice?

That’s the problem with the Roon OS.
There is no easy way to diirectly backup your music files that reside on a Nucleus internal hard drive.

If you have another PC, you can access the Nucleus drive over the network.

See the discussion here -

BTW - I’m not support; just another user.

Most initial backups will take time, but incremental ones should be fairly quick. Take the time to do this poproperly as it’s always much faster than recovery from cd’s as a last resort.

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You can either

  1. Use the export function to move it to a backup location, which is what I suggest you do because the export function will add the metadata to the files. You should be able to select more than one album at a time and export, although, I would suggest doing it in small 10 CD groupings, and add a “Backed Up” Tag, so you can know which ones you have backed up.

  2. You can go to the shared network location on the Nucleus and copy using the file manager of another PC. However, this will not get you the meta data and the files you move will look like:

cdrip1

cdrip2

Plug an external usb drive into your iMac, mount the Nucleus drive as a SMB share… open a terminal window. Type rsync -av , hit space, drag drop the Nucleus share into the terminal window, hit space, drag drop the usb drive into the window, hit return. The first time will take a while… subsequently, only changes will be copied. You’ll end up with a command something like:

> rsync -av /Volumes/Data/Storage/InternalStorage /Volumes/MusicBackup/

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Files ripped with roon’s Rock or nucleus will not have very much in the way of album details.

But does it matter? Its a backup, and they’ll be recognized again when restored. Personally, I think this is a good reason NOT to let Nucleus/Rock rip CD’s, but that’s another discussion.

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I don’t have any of my own music files to speak of, but if I did, they would reside on a computer or external HDD somewhere from before I sent them to Roon. I would backup this drive to another USB HDD and probably keep it off-site.

Jim, you’re right. Normally you’d copy TO the Nucleus/Rock… not from it. A secure source is preferable to a secure backup.

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And, I would not trust my ripped files to Roon, except as copies of my well protected rips.

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Thanks for all the info and advice.

Knowing what I know now, I would not have ripped my CD’s directly to the Nucleus.

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Bite the bullet and re rip , ( to FLAC) that way you have a std format with metadata attached for later use …

Painful but probably the best way in the long run

Should Roon go Poof ??? :face_with_monocle:

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I was going to suggest the same thing. At your leisure, re-rip the files to a USB drive that contains nothing but your ripped CD’s. Then, make a backup copy of this drive and store it at another location.

I have a 4Tb master. In my core plus 2 x USB backup drives

I ought to store them off site , but …

Why should the OP re-rip now? That’s just making work for something that might not happen.

If the files are lost, since the original CDs have been retained, they can be re-ripped then.

The OP asked how he can backup his music files to an external hard drive.

I have learned from the nature of my work that keeping records well is an important of prevention of problems and disasters, particularly if they have legal or security implications. I am therefore paranoid about security of records. My current IT Security consultant similarly warned me as well.

So when I ripped my entire collection, I do 3 copies, 2 copies on different hard disks (SSDs) kept separately and 1 on my NAS. I prefer NAS as most NAS has mirror images of data and an early warning system in case of hard disks failure. Even SSD can fail.

I suppose for the problem described here, the solution going forward is to duplicate files and kept the duplicates in different locations unless updating. If you lose them then you got to re-rip.

The large corporation where I spent my entire career has a department dedicated to nothing but records retention. They set up strict rules for what records we were required to keep and what records we were required to destroy, and exactly how and where they were to be kept and destroyed. We had to acknowledge once a year, in writing, being in compliance and we got audited.

Ok one CD day keeps the nasties away.

I find it strange that Roons rip solution creates such an anonymous file , just to keep it Roon specific ,

Just my 2 p

Yes, thats the spanner in the works, Roon’s cd rip naming scheme. I haven’t used the Roon Extension: CD Ripper v0.4.0, perhaps it works better?