Today I just wanted to listen to some music. However, when I opened my RoonClient on my iMac, I saw that nearly 90% of all imported data is missing. I restarted the RoonServer. Now slowly Roon tries to add some data from the NAS. I have invested nearly a year to clean up from all messy metadata in the system and add missing metadata wherever it was possible to find. Will that all now be gone???
I have a 5-stage backup of the server (every night), but I am unsure whether I should directly rebuild from there.
Roon doesn’t modify the original files, so 90% of your music is not gone, its perhaps just not showing up in Roon. I would imagine the NAS connection is flakey, Roon can’t “watch” a network share like it can local storage. A manual rescan maybe all that’s required. Perhaps your NAS needs rebooting as well.
@ged_hickman1, yes, I rebooted the roon server. Then it started rescanning.
@Mike, I am not talking about the edits in the original files’ metadata. I edited a big amount of data in roon’s database (adding pictures, rescanning albums with incomplete metadata and completed them, etc.).
My main question is whether I should install a backup of the roon database or leave it scanning until end and hope that all my edits are still in place.
Great that you have a backup, I certainly wouldn’t want to lose all that editing work either, but the question is why are the files missing? Are they NAS stored music files, or from streaming services? What are the symptoms; you see a file, but it won’t play reported as missing, or is it just not there in the database? Have you confirmed that the NAS is online, and the files are present?
yes, the NAS is always online and serves all flac, m4a, etc. files. The files are not gone and are available. However, roon missed the majority and adds them back while scanning (slowly, one after the other). With gone I meant, they are not visible in roon frontend. It seems that the edits are still there but how sure can I be?
Is it possible that there has been an interruption of the connection between NAS and Mac which has triggered Roon into rescanning, perhaps multiple times? A rescan may have been triggered (and possibly completed) when the connection was flakey and before it reverted to the correct / stable state. This would explain you noticing a large amount of missing data, and it now being re-added. I have seen similar after network interruptions - depending on the network the full rescan can be slow.
I would be tempted to :
Just let it run while it is still rescanning and adding.
Copy some of my most recent backups from before the problem arose to a safe location where they will not get overwritten, in case you are not doing so already. Belts and braces.
Take a manual backup of the library in the new state, in case you decide a restore from previous backup is needed and you encounter problems with it. (Assumes the library seems to have recovered pretty much fully after the rescan, otherwise likely not much benefit from taking a backup)
Try to see at leasure if you notice anything missing in your library and metadata. if nothing suspicious catches your attention in the library , all good for now.
If not, restore from a recent backup from before the issue occurred. If you did any metadata editing since, that’s what you would loose.
Keep an eye out for similar behaviour.
If nothing truly disastrous has happened, that gives you a fair shot at covering most if not all bases.
The one thing that happened last night vs. all other days of uninterrupted service (I leave the NAS and the RoonServer always up and running) is that we had summer-/wintertime switch today.
Maybe a roon representative can provide an answer whether having 2 times 2am in the morning could cause a problem with roon.
Sometimes, on Windows 10, I “lose” my NAS, and have to unplug everything, reboot/restart everything, then plug it all back up. And then hopefully then, it works.
Leave it scanning, then check to see if a restore is necessary. If so, do one. But, it should be a last resort, as it would negate any subsequent changes made, maybe unnecessarily.
ok, after scanning on the first view it looks like everything is back to normal, except for some albums where roon misses some tracks (in roon, not on disk) and some messed up albums (tracks from a dedicated album where spliced into a compilation), splitting albums into two with messed up track numbers. But, that seems to be usual on this platform.
This leads me again to the request I had some time ago: Please add a switch that allows to mark an album as “DO NOT TOUCH!” (or deliver good metadata).
What is really annoying about the software is that you can never be sure whether roon messes up something unattended or not.
Son, in summary, yes, seems to work, but I cannot state that I am absolutely sure.
I’m glad that things are working for you now. It’s hard to say exactly why this happened — Was there any changes in your setup or any OS updates on the Mac or NAS?
If things aren’t the same as they were before you can always restore a backup and things will return to exactly as they were.
No update or changes happened. Also, as said, I did unlink the NAS several times in the past when upgrading the firmware. Roon did not start scanning on its own, I had to trigger it (roon did believe that I had only that small amount of data).
It might have been caused by the switch from summer- to wintertime. I started with roon last year October/November when we were already in wintertime.