It’s a backup against a single drive failure in your NAS, if you replace it in time. Not against accidental deletion. Or your house burning down.
There’s a word for the thing you are talking about, and it’s not “backup”. That type of protection is called “fault tolerance”.
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It’s not even that. The clue is in the name - RAID, not BAID.
If you or some rogue process overwrites/deletes your files with some janky data, it applies to all your disks - instantly.
If you lose a disk to failure, you have redundancy which confers availability. You do not have backup.
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What might pull me in, in addition to “just” a backup, would be a use case of additionally being able to:
- Send to Archive (move from my local storage but having the ability to restore back)
- Stream to Roon mobile - with the ability to choose a ‘downsample’ rate (16-bit FLAC, 320kbps MP3) that the Roon cloud infrastructure converts (while ‘on-the-go’)
- An option to download to Roon mobile for offline listening (pre ‘on-the-go’)
Is this how Roon thinks of implementing the mobile solution.
Purchase a backup solution and and you can have mobile Roon?
Would be good to get clarification that this is not the case / where this is heading.
That clarification can’t happen because nothing is decided. I’m publically brainstorming.
To keep the conversation productive, let me state that these types of asks are exactly why most companies don’t publicly talk with their users about new features.
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You don’t think the question of a new online service you’re brainstorming being part of a mobile solution is a logical extension to the discussion? In any event, I have multiple Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner backups so my Yes or No answer to the topic of this thread is, No.
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It is, which is why I’m welcoming user opinions on it. I didn’t bring it up btw, you all did.
Asking for clarification on our position is not part of the discussion as it forces us to take a position, which is inappropriate at this stage. That’s why I’m not answering it.
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Fair enough, thanks for the explanation.
My feeling here is that backup on it’s own is not a sufficient ‘pull’ - as many others have said they use other methods.
So as per Dave ‘part of a mobile solution is a logical extension to the discussion’ - and my earlier post, shows that it needs to be more 
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yah, I’m getting that feeling. Ease of backup is one pull, but it seems clear that adding more to it is required to make it beat out the alternatives.
The two suggestions related to that seem to be tied to mobile access and using the backup as a streaming source (or what was previously known as a digital locker)
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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:
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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).
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The new backup option would backup music files, the database and any cover art/photos you add within roon – thus wouldn’t miss anything.
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The new backup option would also do proper db checking prior to backing up to ensure that backup isn’t corrupted.
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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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Not interested, esp as I only have less than 1tb of music files, which is easy to populate among my various drive arrays, NAS, and bare HDD’s in deep storage. I can see possibly for those with larger libraries or technically unsavvy it might make sense, but HDD’s are fairly inexpensive these days, and a bare drive dock under $50, which is the best way to go imo.
NAS or RAID is not a backup if the power supply or controller goes in the box. Or even an external drive that comes housed in a proprietary case. Been there, done that years ago, and when the controller goes and if one doesn’t have another backup it can be terrifying. So yes, the cloud is great for those who don’t want to deal with extra hardware and drives. The hidden cost for many of these cloud services though, is if you need to do a restore.
But it’s still possible that all your backups will be corrupt, no matter how far you’re going back. I’m currently creating a new backup for offsite storage which I’ll also restore from before moving it offsite. As best I can tell this is the only way to ensure that a db backup is good.
And yes, it would be great if db checking could be included in the new backup option, but it would be even better if it was part of the core package.
Words, including technical ones have a meaning. In IT, backup is one thing, redundancy another. RAID is redundancy, not backup.
Yes, but extremely unlikely as the corrupt database will almost certainly cause issues with your Roon setup that you will see long before a year is up. But even your process will not prevent this unfortunately because you can still restore a corrupt db and not know it’s corrupt until it rears it’s ugly head in some way later.
I am talking to our product team at the moment to get this done in a future release.
Thanks everyone and @Craig_Palmer too.
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That would be excellent. I’ve been using Roon since 2017 and have spent many an hour adding data to Roon. The idea of losing it all to database corruption is too hideous to contemplate.
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I hadn’t considered that 