Is there any interest in a music files backup solution?

Roon Software Discussion
125

I had to think carefully about this question and doing so made me think a bit broader about what I’d like to see in an enhanced Roon backup solution.

I should first probably explain what I do and what I see are the deficiencies in my approach to give context to my answer to the question.

My current backup setup:

  1. I backup my Roon database every other day to my NAS. I store 15 of these so I have a months worth of daily backups.

  2. I have a separate schedule to backup my Roon database every month to a different location in my NAS. I store 12 of these so I have a years worth of monthly backups.

  3. My music files “master” db is on my Mac where I do any meta data editing and I use Chronosync to replicate this db to my Nucleus’ ssd. I also do a backup of this master to my NAS.

  4. I use my NAS’ capability (I have a synology) to backup the monthly Roon database backups directory stored on the NAS to Backblaze. I also backup my music files backup on the NAS to to Backblaze. This give me a offsite copy of my files and database.

Why do I do all this and what are the issues?

  • I only do both #1 and #2 because Roon databases can become corrupt and therefore the backups can become corrupt. If you only do a handful of daily backups, it’s possible to corrupt all your backups and then your screwed (this happened to me). You can then only reload and reprocess all your files from scratch. With my approach I can go back a year if I have to find a good backup. If Roon would create a backup process that would ensure a backup isn’t corrupt I could vastly simplify this aspect of my backup strategy.

  • While my Backlaze offsite backup process works seamlessly and is pretty elegant it’s expensive as I can’t use the cheap $60 per year personal backup approach offered by Backblaze. Since it’s happening from my NAS, I have to connect to their B2 backup plan which is $50 per month. Very expensive, but I’m paranoid about losing my media (I also backup all my photos and videos there).

  • Note: Please do not use dropbox for any solution. It’s miserably slow – especially when you have 1000s of files like there are in a Roon db backup and there are the restore issues of copyright data like Danny pointed out in an earlier post.

  • Even with my approach, there is a big missing piece in my backup strategy for which there is no solution today. If I add cover art or an artist photo in Roon (which many are doing because so many artists don’t have photos and often photos aren’t cropped properly for circular frames), this work is COMPLETELY lost when you have a failure. It is not backed up with the Roon database backups, and Roon provides no way to read artist photos either stored with a track or included in the album directory (they should do the latter BTW) so you can’t add artist photos through any external process and therefore able to be backed up separately.

Sooooo, given all this, my perfect solution that I would be happy to pay for would be if Roon:

  • Offered a optional backup program (hopefully inexpensive) that would integrate with a speedy and inexpensive service like Backblaze Personal which is $60 per year (I’m not wedded to backblaze but don’t want dropbox).

  • The new backup option would backup music files, the database and any cover art/photos you add within roon – thus wouldn’t miss anything.

  • The new backup option would also do proper db checking prior to backing up to ensure that backup isn’t corrupted.

  • The new restore process with this new backup option therefore could restore everything with a single button click and you have no ability to get a corrupt database in a restore.

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