What now, @noris?
Thank you.
Hi @KML,
Thank you for checking for that file in your Roon backups, and sorry to hear that it is not present. Since this file is missing, this indicates that there was an issue with Roon creating the backup.
There are a number of reasons that a Roon backup can become corrupted, and this can include failing hard drives, as well as other environmental factors, like power loss, or sync programs tampering with the contents of the backup.
It’s extremely hard to know what might be at play here, but what this means is that when Roon reads the database back, the files are different from what was originally written to the drive, and the changes are significant enough that Roon cannot load the backup properly.
Sometimes, database corruption can be “latent”, meaning that part of the database is corrupted, but the database can still load and future backups preserve the current state of the Roon database. Often this latent corruption is revealed when Roon updates to a new database format, as this process requires that every record in the database is accessed. This is likely the case here — The backup was made after the latent corruption existed.
This type of error is extremely rare for us, and generally the solution is to try using an even older backup, if you have one in order to use a backup from before the issue occurred and saved to the backup. If you do not have any older backups that are able to be restored, unfortunately, you will need to start with a fresh database.
You have our apologies again for the inconvenience here. If there’s anything else we can do for you here, or if you have any questions about the above, please let me know and we’ll do everything we can to get this resolved for you.
Hi @noris, and other members of Roon staff,
(I apologize in advance for my clumsiness, as English is not my first language).
I sincerely thank you for finally coming back to me.
However, I must admit that I was expecting a little more support from the Roon Q.A. Team. Since you have my library on your servers, is there no way for the staff to repair the code and fix the supposedly missing file?
In the last couple of years, I invested hundreds of hours into my library, tagging, organizing, correcting information and so on, because I was relying on the backup system when I purchased a lifelong licence. I understand that few others have lost their work due to backup inconsistencies; this is very likely to happen again unless we understand what went wrong. Roon users have a right to better understand how the backup system works, and how it fails.
So, if I may ask, there are a few things that remain unclear to me, and that I would like to investigate (if anyone could shed light on these matters, it would be greatly appreciated).
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First, you mention that “Since this file is missing, this indicates that there was an issue with Roon creating the backup.” Does that mean that the corruption occurred at the moment of backup creation and not afterwards? If so, is there no way for Roon in a future update, to check the integrity of the backup and confirm that it was successful?
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As for the other “environmental factors”, we can exclude hard drive failures because I used three different types in three different locations (internal and external HDD, and one SSD). There are all working perfectly well. If it was a power loss preventing the backup from completing itself, shouldn’t the next attempt be successful? Also, in my case, it can’t be a sync program issue because the backup I sent you was done directly by Roon without any other program interfering into Roon’s folders.
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You write that “Sometimes, database corruption can be “latent”, meaning that part of the database is corrupted, but the database can still load and future backups preserve the current state of the Roon database. […] This is likely the case here — The backup was made after the latent corruption existed.” In that case I would very much like to understand what is latent corruption, what causes it, how to prevent it, how to check that the library is free of it.
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Perhaps we could also ask other questions. I think I do things that a typical Roon user does not, I use Roon functions that appear to be still buggy, like tagging Classical Composers on the Composer’s page and not on the artist’s page (see: Classical composers tagging not working / dead links). Could this be the reason why a library gets corrupted? Are there any other know factors that can create latent corruption in a library?
From what I understand, latent corruption is an urgent matter for many users, and I hope that Roon will do something to improve the backup system in the next version.
Thank you for your time, and please let me know what you think. If I am to continue to use Roon and start a new library, I absolutely need to know how to prevent it from failing again in a year or two.
Thank you again for your time and help.
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Hi @KML,
Thank you for your detailed message here. I have just checked with our QA team once again, and they have confirmed that since that folder is missing from the backup, there is, unfortunately, no way to restore the backup.
In your original post, you have mentioned that you had to reinstall Windows 10 on your server, can you please confirm why this reinstall was necessary? Was there a hardware issue that required the OS reinstall? If so, it is possible that this hardware aspect also played a part in the Roon backup being saved properly and if the copies to the other locations were made from that same backup, they are all impacted due to this.
When it comes to Roon, corruption itself is not “solvable”. Hard drives don’t last forever and they all eventually fail. This is especially pertinent when it comes to Roon, which relies on your hard drive to keep track of all your album art, edits, metadata, playlists, and so on.
There can be millions of objects written in your Roon database, and sometimes there are things outside of our control that can interrupt your hard drive’s ability to read and write data, leading to corruption or failure to restore backups. It could be a failing drive, operating system error, maybe the power went out, or something else.
To help with this in the future, our R&D team is looking for solutions to implement integrity checks. These checks would stop you from using Roon at all if corruption is detected. Doing this would prevent cases of latent corruption and help ensure that your backups are not corrupt, but unfortunately, this will not help with restoring your backup at the present time.
Hello,
I a new Roon and are in an evualation-period and this is topic (backup, restore, data integrity etc) are the things I need to understand before I can trust Roon and of course what I need to do to always be secure and beging able to restore and rebild the Libraray if something gets broken and that will happen some day.
So what have happen since Oct 2021 and have you made any changes and improvements in Roon in any release yet ?
I really want to know. Thank you.
Back in October @noris mentioned that that Roon’s R&D team were looking into adding integrity checks with respect to Roon’s database. This has now been done, such that it’s now impossible to back up a database with evident or latent corruption. The net result is that backups are now considerably more reliable.
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That is really good . Thank you for your reply.
I Will Do some testing so I feel safe and are prepared.
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