I’m going to be moving to a new machine in the next week or so. I’m currently running on a 2017 iMac and I’m going to a new M4 Mac mini. I plan to set-up the new machine using a Time Machine back up from the old one. My Roon back up is included in Time Machine so can I just transfer it over that way and restore or do I need to copy the back up to a thumb drive and restore from that? Just trying to cut out an unnecessary step.
As I understand it, Roon and Time Machine do not play well together (especially if Time Machine is backing up the Roon database while Roon is running) and while you might get lucky, databases restored from a Time Machine backup are often found to have some corruption after the fact. This link provides some info regarding best practice for backing up your Roon database.
My suggestion would be to create a backup of your database using methods described in that article, install Roon on the new machine and then restore your backup to the new Roon installation.
And regular database backups somewhere other than Time Machine are also probably a good idea. I backup my database every other day to an external drive attached to my core (a 2014 mac Mini) and once every 10 days to my Dropbox account in the cloud.
Good luck, let us know how you do!
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If you use Time Machine, Roon on the new Mac Mini will inherit the same unique ID from the iMac. If you intend to continue using the iMac, this will cause all sorts of problems because both will be seen as the same Roon server/desktop.
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The iMac will be retired and reset to factory settings. I’m trading it in.
Time Machine can create corrupted Roon backups because Roon might update database files while TM creates a backup. You should create a backup with Roon’s backup tool (which will pause the database before creating the backup) and then you can use TM to backup the Roon backup.
Restore the Roon backup on the new machine.
This is all explained in the documentation:
and
In fact, I exclude the Roon database folders from TM backups because the TM backups for Roon are useless anyway, and not letting interfere TM with the Roon DB at all is probably best.
No, it’s fine if a Roon backup is taken first.
Time Machine works fine for this, I’ve used it to upgrade to 3 different machines. Close Roon so it’s not running when the backup is made and you won’t have any problems. For some reason, Time Machine backups are always presented as the villains but any method of backing up while Roon is running has the possibility of problems unless Roon is excluded from the backup.
It’s fine for a manual backup with the Roon server shut down.
However, this is exactly where the problem lies. How many people will remember to shut down the Roon server every time TM creates a snapshot?
TM backups are advised against more often than other backup software because people ask about TM backups more often.
You are correct that “any method of backing up while Roon is running has the possibility of problems unless Roon is excluded from the backup”, and therefore any such backup including TM should not be used to back up a live Roon database. That’s why Roon advises against all of them:
Other backup applications
Because the Roon database is frequently being updated in the background with new metadata, cover art, artist information, and more, backing up your “live” Roon database using external programs can result in corrupt backups. We strongly recommend against using Time Machine, Crashplan, Backblaze, or other backup applications to backup your “live” Roon database. If you would like to use any of these applications to back up Roon, set up a Scheduled Backup and tell your backup program to backup the
RoonBackupsfolder.
Sure, it can work when used with care but not for scheduled backups/snapshots.
Instead of going through the hassle I’ll just back it up to an external before I shut it down. Thanks for everyone’s input.
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Got everything set up today. Only problem I had was having to go in and authorize disc access for my external drive. Took me a couple minutes to figure that out.