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?
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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 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.