How to backup music files?

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?

Yes and no.

The issue with the extension is that it has to mount the CD drive on the machine running the extension and you cannot run the extension on a ROCK NUC or Nucleus. So, already you are using a different computer to do the ripping anyway. But, yes, it does generate the basic metadata.

IMHO, neither is a substitute for ripping using dbPoweramp on a different computer and then copying the finished rips TO the ROCK NUC or Nucleus in your case.

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OP, if you do go down the path of re-ripping, look into EAC (Exact Audio Copy) it is free and acient by application standards. Still the best I’ve found for making perfect copies.

Slight learning curve but once you invest that time you are set for life. I could not imagine a digital music library without it.

Every once in awhile I’ll pick up a long-forgotten CD off eBay. Into EAC it goes then into my main location and backup copies.

The OP is a Mac user, that means xld (free), or dbpoweramp (expensive), or using Rock as he has done. Personally, I use dbpoweramp, and copy TO my NUC Roon core.

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I also use dbpoweramp to rip directly to my nucleus from a PC on the network. I also use ViceVersa Pro to maintain two copies of my library on two USB drives.

I am in the same situation. I have 3000 CDs. 1000 were ripped pre-Nucleus and I have the files for. 2000 CDs were ripped by the Nucleaus. I am trying to make a backup copy and export them to an external hard drive connected via USB to my iMac (I also tried having the hard drive connected via USB to the Nucleus. But If I select more than 2-5 CDs for export, it fails to export and just locks up until I cancel it. Is there any way to improve the Export function so I don’t have to Export CDs one at a time? I read Daniel Beyer’s comments above and I want to export so the files have the meta-data. Thanks. Rob

There’s an issue with the Export function in the Mac version of Roon at the moment: it won’t Export multiple CDs. There’s a ticket in with the developers to investigate it.

Thanks for letting me know. Hopefully when they fix it we can export all rather than just 10 at a time, which is what Daniel seemed to indicate.

My approach is to organize all my music files first on a Synology NAS and then copy from there to my Nucleus+ which has a 4TB SSD installed.

Specifically, I ripped all my CDs on my Mac using dbPoweramp to the NAS. I also copy any other files that I my buy from places like HDTracks to the NAS and keep them organized in specific file structure. This ensures that all my files have the proper metadata, including album art, and are organized in a way that I could easily use other platforms in the future should I decide to stop using Roon, or should Roon go bust.

I then use CarbonCopyCloner from my Mac to sync the files from the NAS to the Nucleus. The initial copy of about 1.8TB of files took a number of hours, but it is quick and simple to use CCCloner to copy any new files and keep everything synced. About a year and a half later I am now up to about 2.5TB in total.

In addition to that, I have two external drives connected to the NAS, one for rotating backups and another which is just a straight copy. I also made a straight copy to an external drive a while ago and keep that one at an off-site location just in case, but of course I can’t add to that over time unless I bring it back and forth. I would really like to use a cloud backup solution at some point.

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Your statement about a nas is not true, mirroring doesn’t provide any security of losing data. I’ve been involved with enterprise storage systems that cost over a million dollars using all the different RAID configurations and a backup is always required to protect your data.
As for your assumptions: not all nas provides mirroring, depends what raid configuration you decide to use based on what is provided. Also, you never want to backup your data to the same device as your source.

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