is there a way to manually recover useful data out of a library folder which hasn’t recently been backed up? (like a list of tracks in the library, and which Tracks, Albums, and Artists have been favorited, or the Playback History)
Due to a hardware failure in my roon Core, I was unable to make a very recent backup before moving to another machine, so I would like to reconstruct data from the old library manually in the new library. Besides the Logs, I didn’t find much I could open in the roon library folder.
Are there any files whose suffix I could change, and then unpack them?
Hi @afritzse ----- Thank you for the report and sorry to hear of the troubles.
Moving forward, as I am sure you are aware, restoring from a “healthy” backup, would really be the best option to achieve what you want. I don’t believe that there is a way to stitch together elements of a database, like you are proposing, but I can certainly check with our tech staff.
Furthermore, can you verify if you have any other backups available? I know you mentioned that you didn’t have a chance to make a “recent backup”, but do you have any others?
I do have a backup I made about two months ago. But because the paths to my local music files have changed on my new machine, and because I would like to recover as much of the TIDAL music as possible, I would still prefer to just obtain data manually from the newest library to start afresh. My old library, i.e. the number of favorites, wasn’t very big, with maybe 500 tracks/albums/artists that were favorited.
I’m not trying to make a functioning library out of the old library, I would just like to find a way to see the track and album titles so I can search for them and add them to the new library. I would be very grateful if you could ask the tech staff about data extraction possibilities. (by changing suffixes and decompressing, for example)
Unfortunately you’re not going to be able to extract anything useful from the database – it needs to be loaded up by Roon.
That said, if you’re looking at the logs, maybe you still have the database? We may be able to move forward with the database itself (as opposed to a backup).
Let us know exactly what you have on hand, and what the old and new setups were (platform, hardware, etc, as described here), and we’ll see if we can help.
Also,
The older backup should be ok. Roon tracks your files using the audio content in each file, so even if your old machine had the file at:
\afritzse\Music\Artists\Miles Davis\Kind Of Blue\01 So What.flac
We should still be able to match up your playlists, favorites, play history, etc, even if the file was now at:
/Downloads/Miles Davis - Kind Of Blue/ Track 1.flac
That’s a pretty extreme example, but I wouldn’t give up on that backup yet. TIDAL favorites are synced with their servers anyway, so if they’ve removed content, the backup isn’t going to matter anyway (although if it’s 2 months old, obviously you might be missing some play history, favorites, etc that occurred in that time frame).
Anyway, it seems like there’s some hope here Let us know the details and we’ll see what we can figure out here. Thanks!
I see, now that the machine running the old core, which I’d rather not use anymore, is functioning again, it would be great if we could perhaps log in on the old core, make a current backup there, and restore that backup on the new core.
Then my question would be, is it permitted to reactivate the old core, then reactivate the new core, or is there a limit to the number of core changes?
On the Mac, which I’d now like to use as the core, I have roon version 1.3 (build 262) stable (64-bit).
The OS version is 10.12.6.
It’s a MacBook 12" 2015 with 8 GB of RAM.
The music is stored on the local SSD drive.
On the PC, I had version 1.3 (build 247) stable.
The OS is Windows 10 Pro version 1703 Creators Update.
It’s self-built PC with a Core i7-2600, an ASUS motherboard, and 8 GB of RAM.
The music was stored on a local hard drive.
I have about 25,000 local tracks, but the collection size may be a little bigger.
On the Mac, I won’t have access to the 25,000 local tracks for now (I will be relying solely on TIDAL.), so if possible, I’d like to remove those from the new library somehow.
So this was where the Core previously ran? If you can get Roon running, feel free to make a backup and restore it onto the Mac – the version numbers shouldn’t matter as long as they’re going up
If you can’t get Roon running on the Windows machine, you can probably just grab the database, move it to the appropriate location on the Mac, and start Roon up there. Just make sure you have another copy of the database before you do this.
The respective Mac and PC database locations are described here – obviously you’ll be moving from the location on Windows to the location on Mac.
Important: Once you get the database loaded up on the Mac, make sure you follow these steps to update your storage for the new configuration.
Let us know the details and we’ll see what we can figure out here. Thanks!