Just lost all but 3 albums from the HDD with 4.8TB of data

Putting it here as this semi disaster does not seem to fit into any category.

I was breaking up a merged set of Charlie Byrd albums and had problems with the last one “The Girl from Ipodemia?” It sort of kept duplicating tracks and would not delete. It seems somehow the efforts to delete that rogue set of tracks caused the whole library of albums except for 3 to be deleted - it happened so fast they were gone before I realised what was going on. With 3 albums still there it does not seem as if it accidentally formatted.

Well it is only a semi disaster because I had the music files backed up on another HDD but it will take 14 hours to copy them over, even with an eSata link. I did do a ROON backup yesterday so have hopefully only lost what I did today + a few altered covers. Bummer just the same.

MORAL: It is essential to have a backup of the music as well as a Roon backup.

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Always backup everything…and not just one copy if can do a second and better still keep it off site then even better…

Keeping critical stuff in the cloud is also advisable…music is something that can always usually be replaced at some cost but personal and original items are the most vulnerable to personal impact.

Easy to get paranoid about backups I have a local and offsite copy of my music and consider that good enough and probably more than most people have?
If I lose my local and offsite copies there is probably a bigger problem I should be worrying about!

I have had a weird problem with delete, also. I traced it back to one of those characters that Roon can’t handle. It also caused the original problem with the file. Sounds like what happened to you.

I noticed there is a question mark in the selection you referenced. From my experience, this is definitely on the verboten list.

I know it doesn’t help, except to say that 1) when you restored your library, you probably also restored the original problem and 2) I always check the characters in the file name before I rip and then change as necessary.

BTW - couldn’t agree more about being overly cautious with backups. I have four. For my Roon library, a local backup performed by Roon on a daily basis and a DropBox backup performed by Roon on a weekly basis. For my music files, a local GoodSync backup and an Amazon cloud backup whenever I add new music

Just remembered, for the sake of paranoia and because restoring from the cloud can be a long process, I also backup to an external drive.

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Absolutely … For data to be considered as secure … it should reside in a least 3 places with one of those being off site.

In a different geographic area, if that’s possible to guarantee. (Eg, earthquakes, floods, meteor strikes.)

Yep … My off site is circa 20 miles away, if something where to take both out there’d be a lot more to worry about than my music collection.

Sorry to hear this happened to you, @JOHN_COULSON, but fortunately you at least have a backup. Reminds me of this thread, have you read it? Unfortunately, the OP was less lucky. Perhaps the replies provide some tips that may help you going forward as well.

Thanks Grump. Could have been worse but I’m yet to see how well it all restores. The “14 hours” was optimistic as it still proclaims there is an hour to go :frowning:

Thanks for the replies everyone. Yes, I’ll make sure I have an extra backup after this experience.

I just purchased a refurbished red 6TB HDD off e-bay at half price. Should be fine if only used as a backup.

I’m nervous about refurbished HDDs. I guess the risk is OK if one has 2 or more HDDs for backup and alternates between them (ie, backup 0 on HDD 1, backup 1 on HDD 2, backup 2 on HDD 1 and so forth), so that if one HDD goes south, other HDDs are still available for earlier backups. I wouldn’t use a refurbished HDD as my sole HDD backup.

My practice is to alternate 2 3TB HDDs (not refurbished), and the HDDs have fairly long warranties (5 years, which I take only as a promise of longevity). I keep those HDDs out of my external USB3 caddy when I am not using them, to minimize exposure to power-surge problems. I also have (so far) a single 1TB HDD (also 5-year warranty), on which I plan to put an occasional single backup (my collection is now about 563GB, so the 1TB serves for a single backup) and put into a safe-deposit box (the 1TB is 2.5 inches) indefinitely; over time I’ll accumulate 1 TB HDDs and keep them in the box (4-5 miles away, so they will be exposed to the same mass-destructive issues – earthquakes, maybe floods – as my house).

Mmmmm. Well the HDD finally finished copying but when I opened up Roon, those 3 albums were immediately there, I guess that was a leftover tit bit from before.

Well then it started loading so I left it in peace only to come back and find the PC hung at 3100 odd albums. Off again and this time is hung at 4500.

So I did a bit of a clean out of junk files and stopped a couple of start up programs so Roon is off and digesting the albums once more.

And I see the “Girls from Ipanema” Charlie Byrd album that I was trying to delete & caused the wipeout is back again. This time I’ll delete it from Windows explorer rather than Roon but that can wait until all the library is back in again.

And I notice that all the editing I did right up to before the wipe out is there so I guess the Roon backup is only needed when Roon itself crashes. So hopefully it is all there again sometime today.

Sigh, all done. Roon “Found/recognised” new albums, some of which were genuinely new, others duplicates. I’m assuming that the current versions of Roon are better at
accepting albums than when I first got into using this program 18 months ago.

And the really good news for me is that all the modified cover graphics have ported through so maybe my earlier concern about losing them was misplaced and, like Sooloos, the graphics are now attached.

Note that I did not have to use the Roon backup. All I did was copy music files from the backup HDD over to the nuked HDD, open up Roon, and apart from the 3 PC freezes, all came though with a few minor additions and duplications referred to above.

Same sort of regime , my main drives is a 4Tb HDD in the PC , not full yet, and 2 x 3Tb Seagate Expansion Desktop USB 3 , kept elsewhere . Same for my Video drive.

I use a sync program (SyncBack Pro) to top up the BU drives by difference. It takes a very short time unless there has been mass editing of Tags

All drives are disconnected once backed up, I am in Johannesburg which is a high lightening risk area in summer as I know to me cost . In summer all kit is disconnected unless in use !!

Mike

A word of advise…dormant hard drives are often just as bad no backup at all…drives need to be spun up now and then to maintain their mechanical capabilities…ssd does need power up to refresh the memories too.

Interesting & most informative link thanks.

Just in case someone else comes across this, you can check your deleted items as well. Depending on the nature of the delete and os you may have another option. Backup is the primary one of course.

The re-installation has been strange. Some albums display the original induction date they went into Roon 18 months ago and all my tagged data, altered graphics on covers etc is intact yet other albums have lost tags and are labelled “new”. No big deal but hard to see why this would happen.