I know this topic has been discussed before, but the question was closed after a year, I saw
I removed Roon from my NAS and reinstalled it on a NUC (rock). Roon wasn’t performing well because I was still running 7 VMs on the (QNAP i5/64GB) NAS, so
Installing Rock was a breeze. Afterward, I restored the backup, and everything worked again right away.
Because I still had a 4TB SSD lying around, I also installed it in the rock server. Then all music from the NAS (also) copied to the local SSD.
My specific question now is: If I indicate in Roon that the music is stored locally, will Roon then re-enter all the metadata into its database, or will it only change the path to the music?
I’m asking this because I’ve made some changes to my music metadata, such as merging multiple versions of a single album so I can find the different albums under “versions.” I’ve also merged albums with multiple CDs, as Roon didn’t automatically recognize this.(sometimes)
If Roon simply remembers that I’ve edited those albums, I’ll transfer my music to Rock’s local SSD instead of the NAS share, causing Roon to immediately scan added music. As I understand it, this only works if Roon and the music are on the same machine?
Thanks in advance,
Léon
Roon mostly identifies individual files by check summing. I have done many migrations and i’d say 80% of my 200K tracks are identified correctly, even after moving their location.
Nevertheless, if you do a backup first, you can revert to that later if you feel it failed to “remember” your files.
The identification can be a hit n miss if you store them on different file systems in a local scenario though.
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If you add the internal SSD as a new storage location, Roon will have to re-indix. However, if your copy of the music is identical (exactly the same folder structure, files timestamps, etc), you can simply edit the storage location after restoring your last Roon backup. I use the rsync command-line tool for this, but there are many such tools with a nicer user interface. 
Editing the existing storage location in Roon Settings will trigger a quick recan, but, if the files are identical, Roon won’t try to re-identify or analyze audio in the files. I’ve had very good luck with this approach.
That said, unless I’m packing my Roon Server to go (e.g., for an Audio Club event), I generally just leave it pointing at the NAS. There are some minor downsides, like sometimes having to force a rescan when I add new content, but I don’t do that often. Big advantage is that it’s way easier to manage and backup the music content when the “source of truth” is the NAS.
I also like the separation of concerns. Let the NUC be 100% dedicated Roon Server; let the NAS be 100% dedicated to serving files.
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Hello Léon,
i had quite some trouble with moving my library between ROCK and other installations (see this topic in support).
In general it is critical for Roon to avoid “seeing” both paths (old and new) at the same time during the transition phase.
My General advice on a procedure to move the music files to the internal storage without loosing metadata edits that are already in your database is:
Start:
Roon running on ROCK with music storage pointing to the NAS
- disable InternalStorage (your 4 TB SSD) in Roon storage location settings in case it’s already mounted and formatted as internal storage
- make a Backup of the Roon database
- remove (not disable) the watched folder pointing to the NAS drive in Roon storage location settings
- in case the 4 TB SSD hasn’t been mounted formatted as internal storage yet:
- power off the NUC,
- install the SSD,
- power back on and
- format the drive via the web interface
- open Roon Remote and disable InternalStorage in Roon storage location settings
- stop RoonServer via the web interface
- copy your music files to the internal drive and make sure, folder structures and timestamps (most important: last modified time) are kept intact during copy (as @David_Snyder pointed out, rsync with attributes -av does a great job for this).
- start RoonServer via the web interface
- open Roon Remote and enable InternalStorage in Roon storage location settings
Roon should now quickly go through the files and re-attach those to the library database entries. You can check on this by opening the library cleanup dialog and check on the number of files classified as “deleted”. This should be 0 again after Roon finished going through all files.
Finish:
Roon running on ROCK with music storage pointing to the Internal Storage
Good Luck!
Roland
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