I’m experiencing very slow (perhaps complely stopped) backup to a USB 3.0 flash drive from my old Windows 2016 Server core machine. Rather than use Roon’s backup function, is it possible to copy the RoonServer directory of the “old core” to that same flash drive (its 128 GBand freshly formatted, so it should have plenty of storage) and then manually insert those files into the new NUC’s DATA folder? Or is there some other way to do this migration without using the customary Roon backup?
Yes, you can copy the database manually. See this for the database locations:
https://kb.roonlabs.com/Database_Location
Be sure to shut down Roon before copying – and do not run the same database on two installs at the same time.
While as @RBM says it true, I am not sure that it would net you a faster copy. either way, the reason the USB drive is slow is due to the large number of small files that comprise Roon Data. My Roon Server directory is made up of 13K small files. The Roon Data is not a single monolithic data store like SQL, with it being all in one file.
You might be able to setup the old backup location as a network share and then point ROCK’s backup restore feature to the share.
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The manual copy worked. I have now copied all of the existing Roon / RAATServer / RoonServer folders and files to the flash drive, and have inserted that flash drive into the new NUC. I can access that new NUC with my Windows machine by going to the network and finding “ROCK.” Under ROCK I find a readme.txt folder and 5 sub-folders -
Codecs
Machine Settings
RAATServer
RoonServer
Storage
Under the storage sub-folder I find a folder with Roon’s name for the flash drive. Opening that I find the folders and files I copied from the old core server, with one added folder (System Volume Information - which I assume I can ignore and / or delete). The other folders there are
RAATServer
RoonServer
Roon
Should I just copy the RAATServer and RoonServer folders out of the storage folder and into their respective folders in the parent (Data) folder? Do I also create a Roon folder (in addition to the RAATServer and RoonServer folders)?
I have not yet moved the external music drives (USB 3.0 drives currently attached to the “old core server”) over to the NUC. Does it make a difference when I do this (before or after migrating the settings)? My guess is that I should migrate the settings first, log in to the new Rock server, disable the two drives (that have yet to be attached), remove the two drives from the old server and plug them into the NUC, then edit the storage settings to point to the drives at their new locations. Am I correct?
Its been awhile since I “played” with Linux. Hope these questions are not too dumb.
Interestingly I used dropbox cloud solution as my backup location when I moved the Core from my old PC to the NUC - luckily it was seamless for me! I did this as I was having issues getting the file via network share either on the PC or my server - Dropbox was much easier in my case.
Well, I hope this works… I got a Roon backup to complete on the “old machine,” but when I tried to restore it to my new NUC everything simply erased! Nothing in the flash dirve. Wierd. So I decided to copy the RAATServer and RoonServer folders from the “old Windows Server” over to the corresponding folders on the new NUC system. I hope it works! There are some files that will be copied but I don’t think will be used - like “.exe” files. But I got 128 GB (rather than 64), so a few extra, unneeded files shouldn’t cause any problems, right? At least I hope not. Wish me luck - I’ll need it!
Oh, and just in case it doesn’t work, I guess I can just start over with the software installation on the NUC. Are there particular files in the RoonServer directory that represent playlists? Other settings are easy enough to reproduce, but playlists will take weeks…
Nope, merely copying files over to the new machine won’t do it (at least not all of it). I’ve got quite a few settings that were “remembered,” but not all. And most annoying are the following (which I certainly would appreciate some advice on how to handle):
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Merging of Albums. Roon often doesn’t like my file system (Album Artist/Album/Disk#/track) and shows one album as several (depending upon the number of disks). I’ve taken quite some time to merge these into single albums with multiple disks. These have been forgotten. If there’s no easy way to do this, perhaps a restructuring of the file system naming would help?
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Favorites. I had marked nearly 2000 “favorites,” all now lost.
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Playlists. These cannot be recreated without considerable struggle. These have been lost in the transition.
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Album Art. Most is there - but some is lost.
Can these be recovered? Sure would appreciate some help here.
Hi Ronald,
If you properly restore, everything should be available.
In your post above, it’s looks like you were able to install ROCK on your NUC, log into it and see your folders.
There are a couple of ways to restore.
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If you used Roon’s backup feature, then from a Roon Remote computer, run Roon and connect to the new ROCK core. It would be a new install, so it would ask you to log in and follow the setup instructions. At that first screen, you would see a Restore link. Use that to run the restore.
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If you only copied the Roon Server Folder from your old machine (Roon Server must NOT be running when you did the copy), you can rename Roon Server on ROCK to Roon Server-old (or something) and then just copy your Roon Server Folder over to ROCK. Don’t worry about RAAT Server.
Did you try either of these?
Cheers, a Greg
I tried the backup / restore procedure, yes. It took several days to get that backup file (fits and jerks - copying would seemingly timeout for many hours, so I would start it again - and again - and finally I got a full backup. I used that restore link and guess what? The files were erased! That flash drive had files when it was inserted into the NUC, but it was wiped clean.
I tried your #2 - but I tried doing it by overwriting what was already on the NUC. I’ll try a complete copy by renaming the RoonServer folder. I assume that if that works I merely need to delete the old folder, correct?
Yup, that’s correct.
Strange the flash drive erased.
Cheers, Greg
Strange indeed - and quite disappointing.
With the copied RoonServer folder (as you suggested) I reconnected to Roon. It appears that all the old playlists are there - but there’s no music imported. Roon is doing that now. (There are a few more than 200,000 songs to import.) I don’t know if the songs in the playlist will be found in their new location - the directory will be different. (I have two drives. On the Windows Server machine I had one mounted into a “Various Artists” directory on the other drive, and that drive was mounted into the music directory on the boot drive.)
Well, I’m very happy to say IT WORKED! Everything is working perfectly (knock on wood). What great software! Everything’s back as it was - but better, quicker and, I dare say, cleaner and clearer. I had my doubts that the new configuration would work without tweaking - but it does. Thank you to all who have helped here and thank you to all the software engineers at Roon.
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