Move music from watched folder (NAS) to internal storage (NUC)

I am running Roon on a NUC with an internal HD on which I copy music, and it also watches a folder on a NAS. In the setting it says: “your files are left in the folder and won’t be copied or modified in any way, unless you explicitly choose to add or delete them from your library.”

Actually, I would like to tell Roon exactly this: please copy all music that you find on the NAS into your internal storage - but I cannot figure out how to do this. This may well be a FAQ and seems simple enough, but I just cannot find it - many thanks for your help!

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You need to copy the files to the new storage location and then direct Roon where to look for them. You do not have to delete the old folders unless you want to - just disable the folder watch using the THREE DOT menu at the right.

Settings> Storage> Folders

Hi @Markus_von_Kienlin,

Take a look at this KB article — It will walk you through moving your collection.

Note that it is important that you do disable your watched folders while moving your collection. In order to keep your edits and play history the files cannot be watched in two places at once.

Hi @rrwwss52 and @dylan,

Many thanks for your replies, but these are not quite what I was looking for: every once in a while, after having added some music to the folder on the NAS, I would like Roon to copy just these new files onto its internal storage in the nuc. The purpose is two-fold: (i) I can grab the nuc and take it to my holiday home with all the music, (ii) I have a second copy of my valuable music collection.

Of course I could copy the files manually, but these implies that I need to keep track of everything that is new on the NAS. I was hoping that Roon can identify all the files present only on the NAS and copy those into its internal disk. Any suggestions?

Thanks, Markus

Roon does not do that, but there are a variety of apps to sync between two file systems, depending on operating system and NAS model. On Mac-based systems, I’ve used Chronosync successfully for many years. For people comfortable with the Linux command line, the rsync command can do every kind of sync between two file systems. O don’t know anything about Windows.

Hi @Markus_von_Kienlin,

This is not something that Roon can automatically do, but you can look into 3rd party software that can sync the drive on the NAS with the internal drive of the NUC.

Your Nas should be able to do this quite easily. Just use the included backup software and mount the storage on your NuC using SMB .I do this the other way as I sync my music on external drive on my Rock server to the Nas using QNAPs backup station. But you can set it up the other way.

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions.

Actually I am comfortable with unix/terminal commands, and I am using rsync a lot to synchronize my macs to the NAS. But I haven’t succeeded making this work well with the Intel NUC running Roon ROCK: when mounting the internal storage disk on the mac via SMB, the access is ultra-slow. Already a file listing (‘ls’) is very slow, and ‘rsync’ takes some 5 min for checking each file (even without copying). This is really surprising: the same procedure works well with the NAS drives, and I don’t know why ROCK is so unresponsive. @CrystalGipsy: I’ll try your suggestion to synchronize directly from the NAS, without the mac in-between. But I have two questions:

  • are there known reasons why the ROCK is so slow in responding (even to simple ‘ls’ commands) when its drive is mounted via SMB on a mac?

  • Should it be possible to call rsync with the ROCK as remote host with a command (on the mac) like:
    rsync -a /macdisk/music [USER@]HOST::DEST
    The only user which seems to be defined on the ROCK is guest, and the NUC does not appear to respond to such calls.

Many thanks for any further clues or links.

You need guest as user and password I have found. I don’t use Mac’s so can’t comment on why you have slow SMB. Mines fine on windows and Nas.

To avoid misunderstanding: the NUC running ROCK runs perfectly with the Roon software on the Mac. The slow responsiveness only occurs when mounting the NUC’s internal disk via SMB and accessing it via terminal on the Mac.

@CrystalGipsy: thanks for proposing guest as user and password. I have tried this, but get ‘connection refused’ errors from ROCK. Does ROCK actually provide a rsync-daemon? This post recommends to run rsync over smb, which was my initial attempt and is very very slow - after one hour, it had checked just a handful of my several thousand files. Thus knowing whether ROCK has an built in rsync daemon and how to get it to work would be very helpful.

How are you trying to connect on what platform? Rock uses SMB v1 I believe so you need to ensure that’s available on the platform. How are you entering the path to your ROCK as this can be different dependant on your platform and how your network handles SMB.

It is a MacMini running HighSierra (OSX 10.13.6). When mounting the external hard disk, I simply use the Finder command ‘Connect to Server smb://Rock’.

@dylan: can you confirm whether ROCK is running a rsync daemon or not? If it is, what are the credentials to be used (guest/guest)? Is there some documentation to be found somewhere?

Hi everyone, I finally found the reason why smb was so slow: it was a setting in the network name server. This fixed this is no running like a charm- I am just surprised that it worked at all in the beginning. Many thanks for all your input!

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