· Other
· The Nucleus boots up and I can connect to it in the Roon app without issue, but I have a question about configuration/storage/attached devices
Having trouble getting Nucleus One receiving my roon backup from PC. Restoring from my PC. It doesn't show on left screen.
Open the Roon app on the PC that contains the backup, and navigate to Settings → Backups.
Then click on Find backups, Browse…, and browse to the RoonBackups folder. Now click on Select. Finally, choose your backup and click on ⟳Restore.
Ok. This is what it looks like. I did a roon back up on my d drive (external hard drive) where most of the music is at. I also have some in C drive inside laptop hard drive. Music comes from hdtracks, qobuz, iTunes. And some directly from artist folder. So I’m not sure if roon back up is covering all my music to transfer to nucleus one. But I don’t where I the roon backup I did. Hope these pictures help. Thanks.
First, Roon backups do not contain the media files. It’s a backup of your Roon database.
Second, do not mount the backup folder under Settings → Storage. Moreover, you seem to have lots of network shares mounted. It would be better to organise them under a single folder on the drive. Likewise, if the removable drive is connected to the Nucleus, you can mount it locally and not as a network share.
Although for ROCK, the section on external storage applies.
Your backups are stored in the Roon Backups folder (see your last image.)
If the USB drive will hold both media files and backups, have these in two folders e.g., /music and /backups.
From your Windows PC you should be able to move folders quite quickly as t ey are already on the drive.
However, it was my under standing that you wanted to restore a backup first. So, do that first, then disable the storage locations and only then recreate them so they point to the USB drive connected to the Nucleus.
Hi @Brian_Sage,
Transitioning your library from a PC to a Nucleus can feel a bit overwhelming at first, but you are asking the exact right questions.
To clear up the biggest point of confusion: A Roon Backup does not contain your actual music files. It only saves your Roon database (your playlists, play history, manual edits, and library organization). Your actual music files must be moved separately.
To make your migration as smooth as possible—and to ensure Roon perfectly remembers all your play history and playlists—here is the recommended step-by-step workflow:
1. Consolidate your music files (on your PC) Yes, your idea to condense everything is perfect. Create a main folder on your external USB drive (e.g., D:\Music) and move all your scattered music from your laptop’s C: drive, HDTracks, iTunes, etc., into this one master folder.
2. Disable your Storage Locations In your current Roon setup on the PC, go to Settings > Storage and disable the folders where Roon is currently watching your music. This prepares the database for the move.
3. Create a fresh Roon Backup Create a second, completely separate folder on that same USB drive just for backups (e.g., D:\RoonBackups). Go to Settings > Backups, choose “Backup Now,” and save it directly to that D:\RoonBackups folder.
4. Move the drive to the Nucleus Safely eject the USB drive from your PC and plug it directly into the USB port on the back of your Nucleus One.
5. Restore the Database Open the Roon app, connect to your new Nucleus One, and go to Settings > Backups. Click “Find Backups”, browse to the attached USB drive, select the RoonBackups folder you just made, and hit Restore.
6. Update your Storage Path Once the restore finishes, go to Settings > Storage. You will see your old PC storage locations listed as disabled. Click the three dots (⋮) next to your disabled music folder and select Edit. Click Browse, point it to the new Music folder on your locally attached USB drive, and save. Finally, re-enable the folder. Roon will now instantly recognize all your files without losing any history!
A quick note on backup safety for the future: While keeping your backup folder on the same USB drive as your music is perfectly fine for this temporary migration, it is not recommended as a long-term strategy. If that single USB drive ever fails, you would lose both your music files and your Roon database at the same time. Once you are successfully set up on the Nucleus, we highly recommend configuring your scheduled backups to save to a different location, such as a separate USB drive, a network folder on your PC, or Dropbox.
I don’t have an usb drive. I would have to buy one. But not sure which size to buy. I’m still organizing in roon storage. I would like to keep itunes separately from my hdtracks. So I have 2 separate folders. Qobuz also has a folder on its own. I can probably just move it to hdtracks folder instead.
Will this work for nucleus one as a roon backup? Or I have to squeeze into one folder as you mentioned?
Also my playlists completely shrunk. Nothing showing on unavailable tracks from improve playlists. Do I have to redo playlists again? The playlists were reading from reconstructed/ audio folder that I had, but now disabled because I moved music from that to an iTunes folder.
Hello @Brian_Sage
Let’s take these one at a time, and before anything else: please stop moving music files around for now. Every time a folder moves or a storage location gets disabled, Roon loses track of which files your playlists point to. That is what shrank your playlists, and continuing to reorganize will keep making it worse. Get the migration done first, then tidy up afterwards.
On your playlists
This is the important one. Your playlists referenced tracks in the “reconstructed/audio” folder. When you moved that music into an iTunes folder and disabled the old location, Roon no longer had those tracks, so the playlist entries went away entirely. Playlist Improver shows nothing to fix because the entries were removed rather than marked unavailable, so there is nothing left for it to repair.
So the key question: do you have a Roon backup from before you started moving things? If you do, restoring it is by far the cleanest way to get your playlists back, and we would do that before anything else. Please check Settings, then Backups, and tell us what dated backups are listed and where they are stored.
If there is no earlier backup, there is one more thing to try. In Settings, then Storage, find the old “reconstructed/audio” location, and instead of deleting it, edit its path to point at wherever those files now live and re-enable it. Whether that works depends on whether the folder structure underneath stayed the same, but it costs nothing to try.
On keeping your folders separate
Good news, you do not have to squeeze everything into one folder. Roon is perfectly happy with iTunes, HDTracks and Qobuz kept apart. What we would suggest is putting them side by side underneath one parent folder, like this:
Music\iTunes
Music\HDTracks
Music\Qobuz
Then you point Roon at the single Music folder, and it picks up all three. You keep your organization, and Roon only has one storage location to track, which is much easier to manage later. The one thing to avoid is adding both a parent folder and a folder inside it as separate locations, since that causes Roon to see everything twice.
On the USB drive
It is worth separating two different things here, because they need very different drives, and you may not need to buy anything at all.
For the backup itself: a Roon backup is just your database, so it is small, usually well under a few gigabytes. Any USB flash drive, 32 GB or so, is more than enough. You do not need anything fast or expensive for this.
In fact, you may not need one at all. Your Nucleus One can read a backup straight from a shared folder on your PC over your network, so you can restore without moving any hardware around. If you would like to go that route, let us know and we will walk you through sharing the folder.
For your music: that is a different matter, and a flash drive is the wrong tool. Music needs a proper external/internall SSD or hard drive, sized to your library with room to grow.
But before you buy anything: you mentioned earlier that most of your music already sits on a D: drive, which you described as an external hard drive. If that drive can simply be unplugged from your PC and plugged into the Nucleus One, that may be all you need. Please could you tell us the make and model of that D: drive, and whether it connects by USB?
Thank you for taking the time to help me thru this. It has been rough. Painstaking frustrating.
So I did have back ups from July 31st. I picked one and came across the one that has everything before I started condensing storage folders. I do want to condensed it to:
[D:] Elements > Users>Brian >Music>iTunes>iTunes
[D:] Elements > Users>Brian >Music>HDtracks>HDtracks
[D:] Elements > Users>Brian >Music>Qobuz
This is exactly how arranged it in file explorer
Like you mentioned. Only problem is the a lot of music is in Reconstructed>Audio folder. But keep in mind I moved all the music (99% of was iTunes) to the new iTunes folder I created a few days ago.So there is no music in those Reconstructed folders. If I disable Reconstructed >Audio folder in storage, the playlists will have unavailable tracks. But it still shows my whole playlists. As you mentioned in your 2nd paragraph.
So I will do as you said, point roon to one single folder which is will be [D:] Users >Brian >Music.
Will this not effect my playlists?
These photos are from my roon back up. I will wait till everything is added. From here I will add folder [D] Users >Brian> Music. Disable the rest of unwanted watch folders before removing.Hopefully my playlists will be fine. I can improve missing tracks right? Then I will see if roon picks up unavailable tracks.
I will wait for response before I move forward to nucleus one part.
Brian
Hey @Brian_Sage,
No apology needed, this has been a messy one, and you’ve been handling it carefully.
Short answer to your main question: no, pointing Roon at the single D:\Users\Brian\Music folder will not cost you your playlists.
I went through fresh Roon Server logs, and can show you why. Over the last day Roon logged just over 25,000 “stealing existing track” events, that’s Roon recognising a file it already knew about, finding it at a new path, and re-attaching it to the existing database record instead of creating a new one. Playlist membership, play counts, favourites and edits all ride along with that record. Your playlist count has held steady at 78–82 through the entire rescan, and your library has climbed from ~4,200 tracks yesterday midday to ~25,600 this morning. The restore is doing exactly what it should.
To be precise about what you saw earlier: you never lost playlists, you lost entries inside them, because the tracks those entries pointed at lived in a folder that got taken out of Roon. That’s recoverable as long as the files still exist and we bring them back in the right order.
There are a few things in your current setup I’d like you to fix before you touch anything else.
Your Roon Server currently has 11 storage locations, and six of them are nested inside others:
On D: (WD Elements)
D:\Users\Brian\Music ← this is the one to keepD:\Users\Brian\Music\HDtracks\HDtracks ← already inside the one aboveD:\Users\Brian\Music\Qobuz ← already inside the one aboveOn C: (Samsung SSD)
C:\Users\Brian\MusicC:\Users\Brian\Music\HDtracks ← already inside the one aboveC:\Users\Brian\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media ← already inside the one aboveSo you don’t need to add D:\Users\Brian\Music, it’s already there, and it has already imported roughly 34,000 files. What you need to do is take the four nested child folders back out. Every file in them is already covered by the parent, so removing them costs you nothing and clears the duplication.
You mentioned there’s no music left in Reconstructed > Audio. The logs disagree, Roon was still importing files from D:\Reconstructed\Audio as late as 11:54pm on the 6th, and your storage screen shows 26,401 tracks there.
It looks like that content was copied rather than moved. The same material now appears twice: once at D:\Reconstructed\Audio, and again inside D:\Users\Brian\Music as Reconstructed Audio HDtracks</code> (~6,200 files) and flac</code> (~5,800 files).
Please don’t delete anything from Reconstructed yet. Leave it exactly as it is, and we’ll sort the duplicates out once the library has settled.
3. One stale location to clean up
Your second screenshot shows [D:] Elements > Users > Brian > HDtracks flagged “This directory is not available.” That’s a leftover pointing at a path you’ve since moved. That one is safe to remove.
4. Order of operations, this is the part that matters most
Disabling a storage location and removing one are not the same thing. Disable is reversible; remove is not, in the way you’d want it to be. Please work through this in order:
- Let the restore finish completely. Don’t add, remove, disable, or move anything while tracks are still importing. Watch the album count stop climbing, then give it another 30 quiet minutes.
- Confirm your music is visible through the parent folder. Check that your iTunes, HDtracks and Qobuz content all show up in the library while
D:\Users\Brian\Music is the location doing the work.
- Disable, not remove, the four nested child locations, one at a time. Wait a few minutes after each one and check your library and playlists.
- Only once everything still looks right, go back and Remove them.
- Leave
Reconstructed\Audio, Existing and Deleted or lost for last, and disable rather than remove.
If disabling something makes tracks disappear that you wanted, re-enabling it brings them straight back. Removing it does not.
5. On the improvers
Yes, you can use them. Roon’s playlist improvers include Match Unavailable and Match to Library, and they will re-link entries that are present but unmatched. What they can’t do is bring back entries that were dropped when a storage location was removed outright, which is exactly why step 4 above is worth the patience.
6. Answering my earlier question about your D: drive
The logs told me: D: is a WD Elements 25A3 USB portable hard drive, and C: is a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB internal drive. The WD Elements will work fine plugged straight into the Nucleus One when you get to that stage.
One thing I noticed: on this morning’s startup, the WD drive wasn’t mounted yet when RoonServer launched, it came online about four seconds later. On Windows that’s usually harmless, but if you ever boot the laptop and find the library looking short, give it a minute and restart Roon Server before assuming something has broken.
And to repeat the earlier caution: once you’re on the Nucleus, please don’t keep your music and your Roon backups on that same WD drive.
Let's get through steps 1–4 first. Post back once the library has settled and the nested folders are out, and we'll tackle the Nucleus One move after that. 👍Hello.
So I have completed my file explorer and roon playlists. I got rid of other watch storage folders and just have one folder. D: Users>Brian >Music. The external drive I have is called WD Elements Western Digital 14TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive, USB 3.0 external hard drive for plug-and-play storage - Western DigitalBWLG0140HBK-NESN to be exact.
I 'm confused about roon back up. I did a manual back up under D: external hard drive. I created a new folder called RoonBackups. Then I selected that folder and roon did a back up successfully. However, I went to find backups to locate folder. It says it’s empty. I don’t know where my back up went.
So I want to get nucleus one started, but I want make sure Im doing this correctly. Please tell how I should do this. I could try to plug external hard drive to back of nucleus one like you mentioned. Which should have my roon back up. Like I said I couldn’t find the roon back up I just did. Or get a usb portable one. Just need to know steps from here.
Thank you.
Brian
Hey @Brian_Sage,
We believe what you’re seeing is expected behavior, not a failed backup. In Find Backups → Browse, you need to select the RoonBackups folder itself, don’t open it and look inside. Opening it just shows the timestamped subfolders Roon writes, which the browser doesn’t present as “backups.” The backup set only appears on the next screen, after you select the parent folder.
Two quick ways to confirm the backup is really there:
D:\RoonBackups in Windows File Explorer. You should see subfolders totaling somewhere from a few hundred MB to a couple of GB. If Explorer shows content, the backup exists.The 14TB WD Elements Desktop is the same drive we saw in your logs (WD’s USB ID 1058:25A3 is the Elements Desktop family), so nothing is out of place there. Two things work in your favor for this move: it has its own power adapter, so it isn’t drawing power from the Nucleus One’s USB port, and it’s formatted NTFS, which Roon OS reads and writes natively.
You don’t not reformat it, that would erase your music. You don’t need to buy a portable USB drive for this.
Steps from here
On the PC first:
D:\RoonBackups, so the backup reflects the cleaned-up single-folder layout rather than the older one.Then on the Nucleus One:
D:\Users\Brian\Music entry will show as unavailable, normal, since the drive path is different on the Nucleus. Add a new folder pointing at the Users\Brian\Music folder as the Nucleus sees it on the USB drive, then let the scan finish.A few notes for after:
If step 3 doesn’t list a backup, stop there and post a screenshot of the Find Backups browser before you move the drive. That would mean the backup landed somewhere other than where you think, and it’s far easier to sort out while everything is still on the PC. 
Hello.
I followed the instructions, but I can’t seem to pass this part. Look at photo. I clicked on restore and back up on the bottom of screen where you login and this is what happens. I also did a login and nucleus one doesn’tsee D external drive. It doesn’t show my D external drive. I had this problem before. If Im doing something wrong I don’t know what.
First thing I did:
Back up now. I was able to see my last restore. That was good.
Then I closed roon. Safety ejected the usb from the PC and put it to the back of nucleus one. Waiting 15 seconds. Turned on nucleus one.
Then I logged out and found nucleus one and clicked on that. Then it shows restore and back up on the bottom of screen. I clicked on that. It doesn’t show D drive or my C drive. Just Dropbox. So I’m not sure why nucleus one is seeing it.
Just for kicks. I plugged everything back to PC. I disconnected nucleus one and clicked on PC. Then I clicked on restore and back up on bottom of screen and it showed my C drive and my D external drive on left side of screen.
Any suggestions?
Brian
Hello @Brian_Sage
Let us take the big drive out of the equation for now. Your backup is small, so we can move it with a cheap USB stick and get the restore done, then sort out your music storage afterwards as a separate step.
Important, and please read this line twice: do not format your WD Elements 14TB drive. That would erase all of your music. The only thing being formatted below is a small spare USB stick.
Please do this:
Please tell us what you see at step 6. Once your library is restored on the Nucleus One, we will reconnect the WD Elements and point Roon at your music, and that part is much simpler than what you have already done.
Hello.
I followed the steps. I got to where I plugged the usb stick in the back of Nucleus One. I clicked restore and back up. Then it takes me to the next page. I clicked select folder. I get a message “no back up found”. But in my usb stick it shows the folder. I did as you said in the beginning choose format to exFAT before copying. It took about an hour to copy of what I just (backed up) into the stick.
Not sure why nucleus one doesn’t see it. Look at photos.
Also I have a Gustard R30 DAC plugged into my laptop. But I recently found out you can plug it to the back of nucleus one. So I need to know if I should leave connected to my laptop or back of nucleus one.
Brian
Hello.
I followed the steps. I got to where I plugged the usb stick in the back of Nucleus One. I clicked restore and back up. Then it takes me to the next page. I clicked select folder. I get message “no back up found”. But in my usb stick stick shows the folder. I did as you said in the beginning.
It looks like you haven’t copied the RoonBackups folder and it’s contents, but one of the partial backups contained in the folder. You must copy the RoonBackups folder to the USB drive.
