I just set up my new Nucleus One after having used my Mac mini as Roon core server for the past couple of years. I’m not a technophile, and I’m not truly understanding some of ways of selecting a backup location.
I used to backup to my Mac Mini, but now that I have the Nucleus One, when I select, Browse, under the process of selecting a backup location, the only visible selection is, DropBox. When I select, Add, I’m shown a form with fields that I’m supposed to enter the “pathway” to where I want to store my backups. This is where I get stonewalled as I’m not sure how to add a pathway to a place to where I want to store my backups to.
So, I took a guess and decided to plug a thumb drive into one of the USB slots in the rear of the Nucleus One. Now, when I choose, Browse, I see my thumb drive along with DropBox. Is this the best method for storing Roon database backups? For now, I did select my thumb drive and performed my first backup since using the Nucleus One.
For the Dropbox method, you need at least a free Dropbox account (and the storage size it provides may be too small, so you may need a paid account). It’s good to have at least one off-site backup, but it shouldn’t be your only one. (And if you have to restore, copy the backup folder from Dropbox to a local drive first. Don’t restore directly from Dropbox).
Backing up to a local USB storage, like you did, is also good. This is the easiest approach. However, a thumb drive is not ideal because they are not designed for many writes and for important data. They fail quite often and have none or poor hardware error correction. You should be using an external hard disk (SSD or HDD).
Finally, you can share a folder on your Mac and then add this as a network backup location in the Nucleus.
Generally, it’s advisable to have more than one backup, and in different places. So, e.g., combining a USB disk backup with a backup to the Mac. Or switching between two different USB disks (and maybe storing one of them in another place that won’t burn down at the same time).
This describes sharing a folder on the Mac to use as a watched music folder on the Nucleus, but it’s nearly the same when adding it as a backup folder:
Thank you so much for your help in this matter! I have added a HDD to the rear of the Nucleus One and successfully set up a backup schedule, and it works! Also created a second backup location on DropBox. And thanks for adding the Help Center instructions. So glad to find such friendly and fast help in the Roon community. Especially for a non-technophile.
This topic is exactly addressing part of my problem. So far I did a backup on an external HD and on Dropbox. But Dropbox is kind of too small for multiple copies. I wanted to do my backup directly on to my Mac.
So I created a folder, added sharing and so on but I constantly get an error message.
You used the name of the Mac’s hard disk, „Macintosh HD“, but you need to use the network name of the computer (the host).
The name of the disk is not known on the network, that’s why you get „host not found“ when it looks for a host named „Macintosh HD“.
Follow this guide, it explains the process for sharing a folder on the Mac and then adding it as a music folder in Roon, but it works the the same for adding the shared folder as a backup location:
I tried my IP address, that seemed OK at first but I found the backup again in dropbox, so no, can’t find the correct things to type
with smb://192.168.xxx/RoonBackup it looked OK but ended up in Dropbox
if I tried smb://192.168.xxx/User/my name/RoonBackup would not take it
You entered the name of your Mac’s hard disk (red highlights in the following screenshot)
What you have to do is to use the Mac’s network name, i.e., host name (green highlight pointing out the example)
If you don’t know or can’t find out the host name, then using the IP is a valid alternative. (The router will normally asign a human-readable host name to an IP, so that one can use the host name for convenience; referring to the host name also means that it does not matter which IP the machine has, as the router sill always associate the host name with its currenlty correct IP)
Good
You made progress by using the IP - Roon can now find the Mac over the network, but not yet the shared folder. This now an entirely new and different problem, to which you couldn’t even get previously (because it already failed earlier when trying to find the Mac in the first place).
Please follow the documentation I linked or at least the example given in the window. I.e., use smb://host/share, meaning first the host name or the IP as you did, then the name of the (ideally new) shared folder that you shared on the Mac.
Post screenshots for what you see if it doesn’t work.
so I imagine my host name is OL-MB16. which is also what I see in finder. But then again does not work either, whether I add Users, or shared or RoonBackup or anything… getting desperate.
Not sure what screenshots I can safely post and which ones not.
Here is what I was doing wrong:
smb://«hostname»/«shared folder name»
(the hostname can be found System settings>General first line Name…
Then I thought I needed the whole file system path. But that was a mistake, you only put that shared folder name after your host name. Seems actually the safer way too.
smb://«hostname»/«shared folder name»
thats it…
User Name
Password
