Onedrive -- principles

Roon Software Discussion
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I have (lately) converted to Microsoft Onedrive as a synch program for my music library, and I would l like to share some things that I have learned.

I run the Roon server on a “dedicated” Windows laptop, meaning that I don’t use that laptop for anything else. I manage my library on another “main” Windows laptop. Onedrive keeps the two libraries synchronized. There is also a copy of the library at the Onedrive cloud site, but I don’t really make much use of that.

Onedrive is NOT a backup program. If I make a change on “main”, then it is quickly echoed both on “dedicated” and on their cloud. This means that if I delete a track or folder from the library, it is very quickly deleted in both other locations.

The “main” library is also backed up via Carbonite and to an external powered drive – it has been for a long time.

Roon sets up a default folder called “music”, and it points to the Onedrive music subfolder on the “dedicated” computer automatically.

The file storage limits offered by Microsoft through the Onedrive product affect Roon. Our family has a Microsoft 365 yearly contract for Word, Excel, and similar programs that are part of the Office suite. With that contract, we can have one TB storage each for up to six users. If there are fewer than six users on the contract, that limit is still maintained at a single TB each. My library is currently 128 GB comprised of 11,251 tracks and 776 albums. (Many of these items are small codecs via legacy from my iTunes days, as opposed to larger current FLAC imports and rips.)

However, that is not a problem. I have no plans to use Onedrive for anything except synchronizing the audio library. I could push the library all the way to a full single TB under the current Microsoft plan. Furthermore, plans change and grow in this competitive cloud storage marketplace. I would not be surprised if Microsoft increases this limit.

I do NOT use the Microsoft default user folder structures for real life things like documents and pictures, because once you start using those, Microsoft obligates that they become stored under Onedrive. Accidental deletion is very easy!

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Thanks for sharing.

Don’t forget that OneDrive also stores file version history and deleted files are kept in the recycling bin for 30 days. Not a backup, but some protection for inadvertent file changes or deletes.

The page describing how to restore files is here.

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I think there is an option to force OneDrive to keep local copies in a directory. This should be used. In past I’ve found OneDrive to be hideously slow if it needs to pull a file from network and it will try to optimize what is only in the cloud to free-up local space. When this happens, and it may happen without warning, if Roon tries to access one of those files I expect something will go wrong as Roon will not expect the very slow retrieval while OneDrive tries to pull the file. Although, with small compressed files maybe you’ll get away with it.

just a quick bit of unsolicited advise from experience… with OneDrive (at work, I’ve since pulled everything away from it on my personal accounts).

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Yes, there is an option available for both directories and individual files to force OneDrive to keep local copies available.

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I recommend experimenting with Onedrive before using it.

For instance, I cut and removed the whole folder for one artist and placed it in a temp folder elsewhere on the main computer. I wanted to see how quickly Onedrive deleted it from the dedicated Roon server computer and how quickly it vanished from Roon.

Immediately.

I then put that artist’s folder back into the Onedrive music folder. I was curious how long it would take to re-synch and re-scan into Roon on the dedicated laptop.

Much longer.