Rebuilding a new Roon Core database in B882 after the failure of any Backup restoration

Roon Software Discussion
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So after having flagging that the B880 Update process caused the sudden and total halt of my Roon system, reported here Update to Roon 1.8 Build 880 corrupts my Roon Core database

I am now rebuilding the Roon Core database in B882 from fresh, as advised by Roon, who have no solution to recover, rebuild or do anything with a backup from B831 or earlier that has corruption.
There is no way of telling where the corruption in the database began, whether this year, last year, the year before, …… or whether was pre the 1.8, 1.7, 1.6, 1.5, 1.4, 1.3, 1.2 or 1.1 releases. The database I lost dated back to 1.0 Build 30, so impossible to maintain backups to return to any point during that timeframe.
Basically if you are able to recover from a past pre-B880 Backup, it is totally hit or miss on finding one that may work, given there is no indication of when the corruption occurred and when it entered in Roon’s unchecked Backup processes.

I can report that, on the same existing hardware platform, B882 is all working fine so far.
All Albums imported, Roon has identified what it can and the full audio analysis is complete. That only took 4-days. I now have hundreds of albums to re-identify again and my album count is all wrong, so a complete album-by-album analysis of the 7,000 albums in my library is required. Good job it is only 7,000 to do and not any bigger.

Checking the details of the RoonServer folder within Roon and comparing against a non-working corrupted one, they are virtually the same size and include the same number of files, so how the database is being used in terms of structure & operation seems to be very much the same.

Given that database integrity testing has only been introduced in B880, I would strongly recommend all users to rebuild a fresh database, after making exports or just manual records of any personal or individualised details such as Tags, Playlists, system settings etc.

Once you rebuild and recovered your library, ensure you make a fresh clean backup, as this only now includes integrity testing and have a rolling strategy going forward in case your new database gets corrupt and a restore is needed. Then you might as well purge all pre B880 backups, as they are essentially useless and can’t be used.

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I can feel you. My update to B880 and B882 did not crash the whole system. Everything went fine during the update and Roon had been working normal as always. But I was unable to do any backups due to a discovered corruption of the DB.

So I was asking for help, but unfortunately Roon was not really into it. Their standard message is: “Do a fresh install with B882 which detects DB corruption and prevents such issues in the future.” Backups? Yes, I had plenty of them. Whenever I do massive changes or update to a new version, I do backups. But this is all useless, because you might have run backups on a corrupted DB for years without noticing. I was going back to 2018 and could not find a single backup that did not result in a DB corruption. Roon handed out a tool for maintaining our installation and secure data loss, which is useless and now leaves its users alone to deal with the problem. I think this deserves another "Product of the Year" award… :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Thank God, I copied my playlists to Qobuz, as I still want to use them while on the road. Ups, did I hit a weak spot here? My original plan was to use Roon as a single entity for all music. With the long promised feature of Roon Mobile, I thought I could get rid of duplicating my playlists to my streaming service (Qobuz). But after this disaster, I think this is a very bad idea… I might up loosing everything by trusting Roon to deal with my data. You might be able to rebuild a local library, by rescanning your music folders, but playlists is the real pain.

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I’m glad you’re getting your library back on track - I can’t imagine having to go through that process - but I think your suggestion that everybody start over isn’t necessary, i.e. if your current database is corruption free there’s nothing to gain by deleting it. The simplest way to check that everything’s working as expected is to create a backup, then restore from it. If that works, your database is in good shape.

That said, “making exports or just manual records of any personal or individualised details such as Tags, Playlists, system settings etc.” would be a good idea just in case you do run into problems with the backup and restore.

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My unintentional solution has been to never have a back up. I have never made a change in the database, I am glad I am not into classical!

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Yep, that solves the problem :smiley:

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This is a smart strategy. Making edits to metadata in Roon is a fool’s errand because your edits will not survive a database corruption, live outside Roon nor enhance the experience of other users. Granted, there are edits one must to e.g. merging and splitting artists where Roon’s metadata sources cause it to conflate namesakes or treat a single artist as multiple artists, with each having an album or two of the artist’s discography. For the rest though, fix/augment the metadata in Musicbrainz where it survives database corruption within Roon and everyone benefits.

To minimise the number of unidentified albums in a database rebuild:

  • for multi-disc sets if you name the files correctly 1-01, 2-01 etc. or file as cd1, cd2 etc. the multiple CDs split up problem goes away and identification is maximised
  • adding albums to Musicbrainz also makes the identification problem go away. TiVo’s metadata often doesn’t include track titles and/or track lengths - both of which cause identification in Roon to fail.

There are tampermonkey scripts / extensions you can add to your browser to add albums to Musicbrainz from Discogs, Deezer, Bandcamp etc.

These days I generally search for “artist - album apple music” in google and paste the album link into https://atisket.pulsewidth.org.uk which largely obviates the need to capture anything manually for submitting to Musicbrainz. If the album doesn’t exist in Apple Music I search for same in Deezer or Spotify.

In the event a library rebuild is needed Roon picks up all the stuff I’ve put into Musicbrainz so the albums etc. don’t need re-identification.

Regarding Roon’s Tags, embedding same into roonalbumtag and roontracktag means the tagging also survives a database meltdown.

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Is there a way to export tags from Roon?

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Haven’t started re-tagging my new database yet. :smiley: It’s on the to-do list to get my Library back to where it was before the latest release killed my Roon instance.

My point was more the tag selections of an existing Backup, that is now non-operational. Even if it is a CSV, XML or even TXT based output, allowing it to be recreated.

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Click into a tag and select all the albums. Then an Export option appears on the top 3 dots menu. You can at least save a list as CSV to recreate it later.
However, the Roonalbum tag method explained above by @evand is better to embed the tags, as it will survive a database change.

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