I might be interested, OTOH it adds yet another backup system (Onedrive for PCs, iCloud for the Macs/iOS devices, another cloud service for my NAS which is where my music is unless it has just been ripped and thus still on a ROCK SSD).
Some questions and thoughts:
Is what you have in mind going to be redundancy against device failure or redundancy against users as well? (For eg, a timeline like history and thus a means of recovering from accidental deletions)? While more complex doing an incremental timeline, this might actually be safer by allowing for rollback of failed backup attempts (power failure/network failure etc, or even some software bugs).
I also have my media shared on my NAS shared as a read only account - a restore option will not be able to write back using the same share credentials. This is something I do to protect my music files from me doing something stupid
Would it be an all music folders approach or selected folders? I can imagine that some people may have music on their NAS + some files ripped to an SSD on their ROCK based device that they havnt yet copied off. They may already have a cloud solution for their NAS.
You also mentioned matching with stream service - I assume that includes the format and not just the track identifier? I have several CD FLAC tracks that only exist on tidal as MP3 or AAC.
I wouldn’t try to increase scope beyond music files - leave that to those who want to deal with the complexity of a system restore, snapshotting etc
There may be use for a middle ground mode - instead of backup to cloud, backup to a local network share in order to allow a user to piggy back onto an existing backup process (for eg whatever NAS->cloud service someone might use).
I wonder if there are any current or possible future legal considerations for knowingly providing a music file backup service (instead of generic backup service). Then add different laws in different countries (current UK rules vs pretty much everyone else - ugh!).
More than a backup of music files I’d be interested in an easy way to get music files onto my NUCs internal SSD. The best for me would be to be able to buy music in the Roon app from Qobuz or Tidal and let Roon handle the download etc to my NUC. The second best would be an easy drag and drop from the website or download folder into Roon.
Backing can be slow. I’m doing a full Backblaze backup and I’m on day three. I only have about 500-600 gb of music files. 20mb upload speed. Not much else to backup other than the music. A few documents…
Perfect for an appliance like experience to just take care of in the background! Who cares if it takes weeks or months even! Once it’s done, it’s good.
Who cares? Well, you would want to care if this was how a long a “Roon” service took. Why? Most people are going to think Roon has their back…that would not be true until after the backup finished. No backup solution should take weeks to finish.
I’ll just chip in here with a recent, real life example of RAID gone bad. I had a WD EX4100 business grade 4 bay NAS enclosure populated with 4x4TB WD Red drives in RAID 10.
The NAS enclosure died and the drives (as I suspected they would be) could not be read by my PC so, unless I had all the files backed up elsewhere (which fortunately I did) then I would have had two choices - buy an identical enclosure or pay for a data recovery expert to salvage the disks. Both options would have been costly.
The issue is that most RAID drives are configured in a bespoke manner to the hardware manufacturer and more often than not, in the event of hardware failure you can’t just pull the drives, pop them into your PC and recover the data on them. It doesn’t work like that and if your enclosure dies you are likely stuffed.
Now, I know what I am doing pretty much with computers so the failure didn’t cause me an issue but far too many people think RAID is back up and it simply isn’t. I was/is an enterprise solution for obtaining large storage capacities and redundancy in case a disk fails in real time. It is not really a solution suited to the home.
Large hard drives are so cheap now RAID is err… redundant in most domestic and SME scenarios. Much better to have several copies of files on hard drives that can be read by any computer
Further, people conflate NAS with RIAD. NAS is a good thing as it allows you to back your files up away from your main computer, not necessarily offsite but at least having one back up away from a very localised issue is a good thing.
I have now taken those 4 x 4tb drives and have one plugged directly into my MOCK server, one into my router for network storage and 2 in my workstation as back up drives as well. This is a far more robust solution than the RAID server ever was.
Yes, I still need an offsite solution and this is where cloud comes in but to answer the question of whether I would be interested in a music back-up solution the answer would be ‘no’. If it could be a music back up solution where I could add other non-music files then I would be much more likely to look at it when considering my options
I use Backblaze. The initial back up took just over four weeks, but incremental changes now take minutes. I don’t see why this is a problem. Sure, the initial backup is slow, but that’s to be expected when you’re shunting terabytes of data around the internet.
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James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
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I said it above, so sorry for the repetition, but I recommend folks look at stablebit as a means to mitigate RAID failures. If a Stablebit array fails, the disc format is just NTFS.
The upload speed for any cloud based backup is not up to Roon but the ISP. I’d already mentioned in another thread, that many ISPs provide horrible upload speeds. I don’t think there is anything Roon could do about it unless they went with something like iDrive and their physical disk program. (which is an interesting program).
I do not rely on just 1 backup solution. Personally, I use, and suggest to friends/family, a safety net of different solutions. 1 a full local backup on hard drive. 2 a hard drive backup that it off-site (in my case I take an extra hard drive to work and leave it in my desk). 3 a cloud based backup. (and in my case, I still have every CD, blu ray, or DVD-A in case I need to go back to physical).
Better support for local drive backup solutions for Nucleus, yes (currently I keep multiple backup drives in two locations, but I have to manage all that from a Mac and use Nucleus as a mirror). Cloud, no.
I have RAID (not a backup) for my local files, and I use Backblaze to manage an offsite copy.
The one thing that’s missing, and has eaten at me for years is I don’t have any integrity checking of my local files.
What if “something” corrupts a file? I have a bad copy locally, and then a bad copy remotely. Because the corruption is invisible until I see it, I have no way to restore a good version. Because of the retention policy of Backblaze, if I don’t notice for a month, it’s gone forever.
If you built something that backed up my music, and also provided integrity checking, I’d likely sign right up. I started to write a utility to do exactly that, but once you get into tracking file moves, etc. the problem snowballed into more than a nights and weekends level of effort.
I would like a local library backup capability to a second USB SSD/HDD. A cloud option would be a nice to have for some of this community. I think a nominal fee increase would satisfy both options but let the user decide what the backup target is (local/cloud) and that the user has to pony up for the cloud target (or the local usb drive). Make it too expensive and we will continue to backup / copy our libraries manually. Great idea, the devil is in the details (cost/complexity).
cheers