I suspect the fact that restoring a roon backup overwrites the endpoint and backup configuration makes it tricky to do a frequent restore.
If there were an option to disable this I might do it more regularly.
Thinking about option 5, if I was to do it I would do it like this as I am running my core on a Linux box (with Debian 11). Assume location A has your core and location B is the remote location.
- run a wireguard (preferably this) or openVPN server on the core at A
- Purchase a router (I would use an openwrt box) that can act as a VPN client and install that at B, connect to your core / VPN server. This will direct route all the traffic on this device back to A
- Connect your devices that you want to use with Roon at B to your new router.
I am not sure this solution will work, it needs testing. It will also need some technical knowledge to implement and you will need some good quality bandwidth between A and B.
I have 2 licenses. Master library is at #1. I simply upload anything added since my last visit to #2 from a portable hard drive when I arrive. Easy in my case to locate new material by date. I guess I am not concerned about the play history.
Option # 1
Snowbird here, i pack my Synology NAS for the drive south then do the same for the migration north. Works for me as I only change locations twice a year.
This is exactly what I do. One license….two macs….and Tidal and Qobuz keep me synchronized. My HD Tracks I bought I copy to USB Drives and then add those tracks to each roon library. K
I am currently spread over 3 homes, two in the US and one in the UK although by next year in retirement will be down to one in the US. I have one lifetime sub and a nucleus in each of the three locations controlled by iPads. My music sources are Tidal and Qibuz plus a Naim Uniticore on which all my ripped CD’s are stored. The naim has twin portable 4Tb ssd drives which back up all the files. As I move from home to home I simply take one of the current backups with me and swap out the equivalen drive attached to the nucleus. This keeps everything current 
I have one licence and one core, but actually listen to roon in 2 houses.
I’ve set up a painless VPN through the Zerotier software (free and multiplatform).
With this, i can stream in the main core environmnet and in the second house simultaneously with no problem (my core is a WIN PC).
I could also install zerotier on a raspberry and stream to it in a remote location.
The only limit in this approach is (i think) the upload limit of the core network.
And the fact that in the second house you need something running zerotier (another PC/MAC, or a raspberry). But you need it in any case if you run a second core… (and more powerfull)
On the other hand, i have all my history and tags wherever i listen to music. And no need to sync.
Another point: all my library is local, and huge. At the moment everything is on a 14TB HDD. So basically a 2 core system (and 2 HDD with doubled library to be synched) would be quite expensive. But… with that system you get a backup as a benefit… and you need it in any case.
It’s extremely simple to do. But it will cost you some HW. That can be purchased from PC engineers
Then you install IPFire.
You would normally replace your routers with this system.
You set up VPN net to net quite easily by using IPFire.
If you’re happy with using your iPad or iPhone as USB source, IPFire has it all set up. I use this in my car all the time.
Is there something different about IPFire’s site-to-site VPN vs. OpenVPN site-to-site for instance? So far in all my research, I’ve seen statements like “UDP broadcast packets do not traverse subnets” let alone site-to-site VPNs. So we’re left with Aaron Turner’s udp-proxy-2020 or mDNS reflectors of various sorts - which I’m still struggling to get working, despite his incredibly generous help.
Roon only uses mDNS for AirPlay and Chromecast not sure about other devices but these don’t use UDP. Unifi has the ability to forward mDNS across vlans out of the box as long as you enable it in the GUI. I have all my Chromecast enabled stuff on its own network and works fine. Also all AirPlay devices can be seen on devices on any of my vlans. But RAAT uses UDP broacasts which are stuck in their broadcast domain without tinkering.
One thing I have noticed though is if I use the Roon app on my Mac which is on a different VLAn it does pick it up when my VPN is running. It always works as a remote as they again seem to use mDNs as I can use my remote on phone on any of my vlans but my phone won’t seem as a zone unless it’s on the same vlan. So some oddities.
Here you can see the Mac on vlan 1
My core is on 5 as are all my endpoints other than chromecast.
Here’s Chromecasts on 4
Since I now have two items of the HW I linked to, as well as two homes, I shall during next month verify this myself.
As said for IOS and roadwarrior, it’s working very well.
I have a dedicated Nuc with Rock as a core at home and I was just switching between that and my laptop or Mac at my flat in London via Bluesound node 2i, but got fed up of losing my downloaded files in Arc which meant I couldn’t use it on the Tube. At the moment I have an old iphone with Arc into an iFi Hip Dac and RCA into my amp at the flat. Not a very elegant solution but it does work and sounds good…
Johnny,
I’d love to learn how you’re using rsync with Synology. I’m running Roon on our Synology server in one home, and I’ve fallen in love. Such a great program. I’ve only been using it for about a month, but it’s changed the way we’re listening to music.
I now want to run Roon in our other home and am trying to figure out the best way to do this.
I have the same Synology (DS1819+) in both homes. I was just going to run a separate core for the other home. But, if I could sync them that would be best.
How did you accomplish this?
My experience is that it’s easy to 1) keep music files in sync, multiple methods available, but hard to impossible to 2) keep the Roon state (library metadata, playlists, history) in sync. I gave up on #2. For #1, I use Syncthing for my Ubuntu Linux-based music servers (which are also Roon Cores), but I for Synology there’s a way to sync shared folders across multiple NAS. Be careful to that just for music files (watched storage folders in Roon), not the folders where Roon Core keeps its state, which would lead to disaster.
I have two homes and two cores, each home has its own Roon license. Both cores and libraries are on their own QNAP NAS. I have external drives that I use to copy and sync the libraries. I use QSYNC which syncs the music libraries to my portable drives. I sync each NAS to their own external drive, then take that drive to the other home and sync the NAS to the portable drive. Music added in home one is synced, then taken to home 2 and vice-versa.
mDNS is multicast (it’s in the name). Multicast, like broadcast traffic, does not traverse subnets without additional configuration. I suspect you have the mDNS option enabled on your USG and that is why you are seeing mDNS across your subnets. Not all consumer routers are able to do this. Also, I believe RAAT uses SSDP for discovery which is multicast, not broadcast.
mDNS uses UDP.
What I have is a 2TB SSD that’s attached to my Synology NAS. I used docker to load the Roon core and music library all to this drive. So, as far as I can tell 10)% of Roon is on this portable SSD.
Would it work to simply take this drive with me and reconnect to the other Synology NAS when I travel to the other home?
So what I’m currently doing is basically what @Fernando_Pereira is describing below, albeit with different tools.
My strategy is currently that I have two different ROCKs, 1 in each home. And I have a DS918+ in one home, and a DS220j (really basic, low power) in the other, and I keep a “multi-master” so I can rip / add in each home and then I have a multi-tier backup strategy.
So…
- I have Synology DriveSync keeping a shared folder called “music” in real-time sync across the two homes. Each ROCK is pointed to that shared folder on its local network. [I should note that I don’t like exposing my NAS to the internet, so I don’t have QuickConnect, and I only use DDNS for my site-to-site VPN, no ports are open. I use a site-to-site VPN so the two NAS’ are visible to each other, albeit on different subnets; this is easier to achieve on a dual Unifi system than I would have thought]
- I have rsync copying the full contents of the “music” shared folder on the respective local Synology to a USB attached SSD at the primary location. It’s a form of backup.
- Once every 12 months or so I copy the whole music folder to a spinning disk and then put that HD in my brother-in-law’s fireproof box in his basement. This is true paranoia at work.
- I have Hyperbackup keeping a copy of the DS918+'s music folder (and a bunch of other photos, documents, videos, other stuff that’s important but too big to store on Google Drive) on the DS220+ over the VPN. I have that set to Smart Recycling with a rotation of 80 versions. [note I would use snapshot replication as it’s much better, but I only have a DS220j and not a DS220+ which you need, I can deal with this]
- Finally I have every other day Roon Backups running from the primary ROCK (the one in the same home as the DS918+) to both it’s local NAS and over the VPN to a CIFS mount on the DS220j. That way I have a local backup of the core, and an offsite backup. Every once in a blue moon I get frustrated that one of my playlists is only in my primary home when I’m at my second home, and I do a restore of the backup from its local Synology and then go through the hassle of re setting up endpoints.
For a while I had rsync copying locally from the “music” shared folder to those USB SSDs which were attached to each of the ROCKs. Then I realized all that was getting me was not having to manually force a rescan of the library if I added music locally and wanted to listen to it right away (they’re both set to rescan every 12 hours anyways). That felt unnecessary, and the rsync jobs were a little fragile, had to monitor emails for occasional issues, usually related to network. Having the music on the NAS has been 100% fine. And if I start having network issues or whatever, I can always revert to rsync to copy to the ROCK-attached SSDs.
I’m still trying to find an uninterrupted day to try to get udp-proxy-2020 set up on both Unifi ends so I can try using one core to serve music to endpoints in the other house. I’m so skeptical that this will work given the small buffer size of RAAT etc. that I’m just not that motivated, and what I have works and works really easily right now. I learned a ton through this process about VPNs, the different Synology backup strategies. and rsync.
For now, I’m with Fernando - and still holding out hope that someday Roon will offer something better - but this is not high on their development list, nor should it be.
I don’t know what would happen with that drive swap, I don’t know much about Docker and only a bit about Synology. Before my current setup, I was carrying a whole small fanless Roon server between two locations, which was tolerable, but impractical for longer-distance trips. With my current setup, Syncthing maintains music file synchronization across North America 
What do you mean when you write the you used Docker to load the Roon Core from the external drive? Do you mean that the external drive is where your “app” and “data” folders live and that you mapped them into the container from there? Or do you mean that the container itself is there?
I don’t think I would try to do what you’re describing. That said, I think the best approach would be to not try to install the container on the removable drive but to just keep the app and data folders there. Have a container installed on each NAS. Be careful to fully shut down Roon before removing the drive for transport.
It’s fine if your local library is on that removable drive, too.
I’ve theorized in the past that there’s another way to do this, which isn’t all that different from your idea of carrying a drive back and forth. The idea is that you do something like this:
- Create fully functioning Roon Docker instances on both NAS devices
- Shut them both down
- Create bi-directional sync relationships between for the app and data folders. If you’re me or @Fernando_Pereira, you do this with Syncthing. If you’re sane and don’t want to go down the Syncthing rabbit hole, use Synology’s built-in drive sync
- Manually control making one or the other home the “master”. Manage the promotion/demotion yourself carefully. To switch between homes, make sure both containers are off. Let sync quiesce, turn on the one you want to use. To go in the other direction, repeat the process. Don’t ever, ever let both run at the same time
I wouldn’t do this without VPN or some strategy for remotely managing across homes. When I’ve had multiple homes, I’ve used VPN and I assume that if you’re technical enough to be having this conversation, VPN isn’t a stretch.
I can’t figure out why this wouldn’t work. It’s fragile because you’ll really screw things up if you let both run at the same time.
If you do this, please be absolutely sure to turn off “Auto Restart” on your docker containers. In the case of a power outage or a NAS reboot, you’ll need to manually start the container.
Please let me know if you do try this! 