Question About Adding Another External Hard Drive

I use iTunes on a Windows10 Pro machine, have a 4TB external Western Digital USB-attached disk drive to store my 44.1/16 and higher res AIFF files.

Thinking of what it would be like to recover my 500 gigs of music in the event the disk drive fails (from my Carbonite backup), and finding the exact same model of the Western Digital disk drive is available, I purchased a second drive and copied my iTunes music to the new drive.

After making the copy, I shut down the Windows machine and with only the new Western Digital drive connected (as the E drive), Roon didn’t seem to see any of the music on the new drive. I suspect Roon does some “indexing” and automatically adds new music, when found? Will it be a problem to boot up the Windows machine and start Roon with just the new Western Digital drive connected…so it does it’s “behind the scenes magic” with the new drive?

Hi @Evan_Rosenberg ---- Based on the feedback you’ve provided, you will want to perform the following:

  1. Make sure the application is not active and mount the new drive to the computer, making sure the previous drive is not attached.

  2. Once mounted, launch Roon and navigate to your “storage” tab found in settings.

  3. You will want to remove the watch folder that was previously watching the first drive. The reason being is that, that watch folder was seeing a different path to your music as the current drive is listed as “E:”.

  4. Create a new watch folder that is going to be grabbing the media from the new drive (E:). Once mounted all of your edits etc should be restored.

-Eric

Eric,
Thank you very much for your quick response.
My motivation to get this second external drive is to minimize the time to recover from the first external drive, if it failed.
So, it sounds like what I’ve done, just copying the music from the first drive to the second one, with Roon not running, is the best option.
In the event the first drive dies, I could mount the second drive (only) and fire up Roon and let it “watch” this new drive, but until then, just copy the AIFF files (and folders) from drive to drive, for "safe keeping.
BTW, I really really really love Roon. I bought a music server 2-3 years ago, with Roon running on my Windows10 Pro machine, don’t use the music server anymore…considering selling it!

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