Playlists in Roon emptied of content (ref#USDFWY)

[connor]

Hi @Alan_Meldrum,

You’ve endured an undue and unprofessional wait time for a conspicuous and frustrating problem. Thank you for your patience. I’ll aim for brevity in troubleshooting from here.

@Alan_Meldrum

My watched folder containing my iTunes library does not have the Database Backup folder within it, so I thought I was OK, as the Database Backup folder is not being scanned by Roon. Is there still some risk in what I am doing?

There is some risk in keeping your Roon database and Backups on the same drive; latent corruption or hardware failure will compromise both. Your particular case shares the additional vulnerability of both drives being identically named in the filepath and within Roon.

When you reconnected Drive 1 after performing Disk Utility, Roon appears to have cross-indexed the two drives, searching for content in Drive 1 in the identical filepath (/iTunes) in Drive 2.

Since you have redundant Backups to two locations, try removing one of these drives completely, disconnecting the Backup location and any associated Watched Folder. Leave only a single drive with the /iTunes folder and M3U file in use by Roon for your library.

Does this change any behavior?

If not, then keep Drive Two disconnected, and try the following. Take note this will require rescanning/reimporting.

• Stop RoonServer from running in Nucleus’s WebUI
• Navigate to your Nucleus’ Database Location
• Find the folder that says “RoonServer”
• Rename the “RoonServer” folder to “RoonServer_old”
• Restart the RoonServer in the WebUI to generate a new Database
• On the Roon Remotes, press “Use another Roon Server” and connect to the new database

From there, add the Watched Folder back from Drive 1 again. Please let us know if this restores the playlist content as expected.

We will watch for a response. Thank you again for your long-standing patience.

[Alan_Meldrum]

Can I ask, what was the point of me sending you copies of an earlier backup folder? I did as requested, but you make no mention of it.

Following advice from community members earlier in the thread, SSD1 connected to my Nucleus contains only my watched iTunes folder. SSD2 I disconnected and erased using Disk Utility, and I now use this for Roon Backups only.

Previous to this matter, I had a problem a few months ago, when I accidentally tried to save some tracks from Roon into a playlist in Qobuz which was full, with 2,000 tracks in it. The outcome was that the playlist in Qobuz emptied, causing me a lot of grief. Qobuz laid the blame at Roon’s door, Roon offered me no explanation as to why this might have happened.

This most recent event involved me losing the content of countless playlists that were carefully curated in Roon, causing me additional grief. As a result, I no longer actually trust Roon any longer for making playlists, so I have playlists that I created historically in ITunes that I can access via Roon, and likewise all of the playlists that I have created in Qobuz, - I’ll just stick with them thanks. I made the mistake of thinking that playlists I created in Roon would be secure, but experience has demonstrated that unfortunately they do not seem to be, so I won’t bother creating any more, and that way I won’t have to worry about losing them. I also won’t save tracks from Roon to Qobuz, as that process can also go wrong.

When everything is on point with Roon I enjoy using it, but there have been too many occasions when it has been very clunky (songs slow to start playing; artwork for iTunes music changing to the next track’s artwork half way through a song; the aforementioned playlist issues), and when I have sought help the response times from support is beyond parody. I only persevere because I bought a lifetime subscription, but if I could make that choice again I wouldn’t bother.

My concern at the moment is that my backups are only being copied to one location - Nucleus > SSD2 - when Roon recommends copying the backups to ‘multiple’ locations if possible. How is it possible to backup to ‘multiple’ locations when there are only two USB connections on the Nucleus for external drives, and you do not want me to store the backup folder and the iTunes folder together on one drive? Could you advise please?

Also, I note that scheduled backups are not happening with any regularity, and I often find that I have to force a backup manually, which will work. Is there any reason why scheduled backs should not be getting completed. Once again, if you could advise I would be grateful.

It would also be nice if you could reply in a reasonable time frame. ‘You’ve endured an undue and unprofessional wait time’. Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.

A

[Jim_F]

These are my backup routines to an attached USB HDD. Music is stored on a SSD installed inside the Nucleus and backed up to my Dell laptop. I have an unused USB port on the Nucleus if I ever choose to use it. The backups always work. I use a 1TB HDD I removed from an old computer.

Example:

[Alan_Meldrum]

Hi

[moderator edit:
Added @Jim_F so he now’s you have replied.
@Alan_Meldrum, Note when replying to a specific user, please use the reply icon at the the bottom of their post, not the topic “reply” which is typically used to add non specific comment.
]

My scheduled backups worked successfully for years, so I do not understand why they have regularly failed to complete in the recent past. You can see from below that the last backup was on the 10th Dec, this being the 12th.

Obviously pleased that yours always work, but that doesn’t really help me solve the problem of why mine don’t.

From what I can glean from your screenshots, you are saving backups to three separate folders - weekly, monthly and quarterly - within the one external hard drive. So you are saving the backups to ‘multiple’ locations, albeit within the one storage device, is that correct? Might I ask what protection that would offer you should the external hard drive fail? Would you not lose all of your backups simultaneously?

Could you elaborate on the SSD that is installed inside the Nucleus? Forgive me, because my IT knowledge is extremely limited, but if you wanted to update the library contained in that internal SSD in any way, what would that entail? To give you an example I will occasionally want to update the iTunes Library XML file because I have modified playlist content on iTunes, so I would create the new XML file on the Mac (which is upstairs), then disconnect the SSD containing the iTunes library from the Nucleus (which is downstairs), and connect it to the Mac so I can update the XML file in the music folder on the SSD. What would you have to do if you wanted to do something similar?

If your music is stored on this internal SSD, how did you add the music to it in the first instance? If your music is backed up to your Dell laptop, and say for example you expand your library, how would you update the music folder on the Nucleus internal SSD to implement these changes? I’m just curious, because I don’t really want to go down the route of adding an internal SSD, I really just want the kit I have at the moment to work as efficiently as possible, but I am interested in how your system functions compared to mine.

Best regards

Alan

[Alan_Meldrum]

@Alan_Meldrum

Added @Jim_F so he now’s you have replied.

How does one do this?

Bit daft having two reply buttons, isn’t it? Thought I had replied to Jim_F, but obviously not.

A

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

@Alan_Meldrum

Bit daft having two reply buttons, isn’t it?

One is for the reply to a specific post, one is for a reply to the thread at large. Makes sense in principle because these are not the same things.

However, users often don’t know and it would help if the buttons were labeled accordingly. And if the reply to a specific post immediately follows the post, the forum software doesn’t make it clear to others which button was used, which is also not ideal.

[Jim_F]

As you said, all of my Roon backups are stored on one external USB HDD so, if that drive failed, I would lose them all. That’s not a huge risk for me because there is really nothing I would mind losing in my Roon database. I don’t do much, if any, editing and mostly just stream from Tidal and Qobuz. They would automatically repopulate if I ever had to replace the internal system drive.

I have very few albums in my local library. I used Windows File Explorer to drag and drop them from my Dell XPS 15 to my internal music drive in the Nucleus.

I think it’s a relatively low probably my Nucleus system drive would crash at the same time my backup drive crashed. I guess a more likely scenero would be some corrupted files, etc. If I was concerned about that, I would occasionally do a forced database backup to my Dell. I have done that from time to time and it’s very simple.

[Singleton (- Audio Astronaut)]

Hi @Alan_Meldrum ,

If your risk adverse, “as am I then take no chances and backup to secondary and or even a third location or more. Outside of your having difficulties Roon’s backup implementation is the best of its kind that I’ve seen on any stand alone software outside of backup software. There really are a lot of options and even more if you introduce a little creativity.

Adapter

Dropbox might be a pain to use and many of us hope never to use it but running that bad boy at night for redundancy is a good plan. If you don’t want to pay Dropbox for the space thats understandable. Anyway a dongle provides more flexibility but so does moving your backup to a network share such as your mac which we discussed earlier. This was clearly a catastrophic event for you so plan on backing up often and I do believe that Roon does recommend that you do so to various locations as well. That said keep it in perspective @Jim_F response is correct regarding probability but he also has a greater skillset than the vast majority of users working with Roon.

I don’t think anyone wants to revisit this problem my friend. Plug in a dongle and add as many externals as you like (I like Jim’s use of an old hard drive) do the same. Back that puppy up and get back to enjoying music and you should have a few more years with nothing to worry about, Jim also uses a very intelligent backup scheme you may wish to emulated or do something similar.

[Alan_Meldrum]

Hi @Singleton

Thanks again for the advice. The dongle option ticks a lot of boxes, in that I can back up to multiple locations, and it is a solution that even I know how to implement. A lot of advice I have looked at on the forum for various issues is considerably beyond my comfort zone - it’s like showing a dog a card trick - but I’m fine with things that plug into sockets. I have contributed to Jeff Bezos’ retirement plan, and a dongle is arriving tomorrow. Cheers mate!

A