I have a home Mac and an office Mac. So I had the bright idea that I could transfer all the painstaking edits I’ve made on the home Mac (such as added album art or manually identified albums matched to Roon’s album database) to my office Mac.
This process alone doesn’t transfer my manual updates (added album art or manually identified an album and matching to Roon’s album database) from my home music library to my office music library. Other settings such as watched folders and zones ARE faithfully transferred.
Related questions
Where is album art and Roon’s album database match info stored? In the database backup?
What content is stored in the /Users/ [your user name]/Library/Roon folder?
What’s the recommended strategy (if any) for backing up the /Users/ [your user name]/Library/Roon folder?
Is there a recommended workflow to achieve my goal that I’m missing?
Home configuration:
– what version of Roon you are running: Roon Version 1.3 Build (218)
– What operating system you are running: OSX El Capitan 10.11.4
Basic information about the device you’re using
– Mac Mini Mac Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz ; L2 Cache:3 MB; Memory:8 GB
Describe where your music is stored:
– External Drive: Newer Technology Guardian Maximus 4TB RAID1 connected to iMac via USB3
– Display: Pioneer Plasma Display PDP-5016HD connected via HDMI
– Songs in Library ~40,000 Everything from ALAC, to DSD, FLAC hi-res PCM.
– Running To HQ Player Desktop Version 3.15.1 Via Airport Extreme as a router To Sonore MicroRendu (in NAA mode) To Benchmark HGC DAC2
Hey @Tim_Hartford – while I suspect this should work and maybe something’s gone wrong here, I should mention that our backup and restore functionality wasn’t designed for this case, and taking a database from one location and syncing it to another location on a regular basis isn’t something we’ve tested in house at all.
Syncing your Roon library to multiple locations is something we all really want, and it is on our roadmap to make this a first class experience – for now, just be aware that the backup feature wasn’t designed with this use case in mind, so it may take a little extra effort to make this work.
Moving on, this does sound wrong to me, assuming both locations have the same files:
Can you give us a little more information about
What your storage configuration looks at home
How it looks immediately after you do the restore at the office
How you’re updating your storage configuration at the office after the restore
Screenshots would be helpful here.
The correct steps at the office after restoring the backup are as described here.
Regarding what the storage configuration looks like, are you referring to screen captures from the finder or from Roon settings?
There are subfolders in the watched folders, assuming you want those shown too?
Just the Storage tab of Settings in Roon.
> - Also, just to clarify, are added album art and manually identified albums that are matched to Roon’s album database supposed to be stored in the database backup?
Art will be either stored with the files, or in Roon’s database – it should be part of the backup, but this depends on us correctly identifying the media.
If you’re not following the right steps to update your configuration at the second location, it’s possible that Roon is seeing your files as new imports, as opposed to recognizing they were previously imported (but are now simply in a new location).
That’s why it’s important you follow the steps in the KB article I listed above, and explain exactly what you’re seeing and doing after you restore.
Hi @Tim_Hartford ----- Thank you for touching base with us. Your feedback is appreciated! I just want to take a step back here for a second in order to verify somethings.
I see in your most recent post you’ve provided screenshots of what is appearing at home versus what is appearing in the office, the example being Bix Beiderbecke. Here is what we need to understand: Did this artwork…
Come from your file tags?
Was the artwork stored along side the media in your watch folder(s)?
@Eric, Bix Restored Vol. 1 artwork was uploaded through the Edit > Edit Fields > Album Artwork > Add Image function.
All the other art came from Roon’s metadata provider(s).
My big concern is I’m following the same basic instructions I would follow if I migrated to another computer/storage configuration, which is likely to happen later this year — hopefully by choice and not by necessity. If it isn’t working now, I’m concerned it won’t work then. That would be highly problematic.
Hi @Tim_Hartford ---- Thank you for touching base with me, very appreciated! Just to clarify, the home configuration is functioning as expected and it is just the office that is having this issue, correct?
Hi @Tim_Hartford ---- Thank you very much for confirming that information for me. I would like to have you try this procedure again as everything should be transferring over as needed from the back up.
Before you give this another go, I would like to get a better sense of what you did (procedurally speaking) the first time around. I understand that you followed the KB articles that you cited in your original post but I want to be certain that all your steps are correct in the interest of not ending up with the same results after another restore.
Understandable. I’ll review and get back to you. Would it be better for me to repeat by removing all the application and library files to do a clean install? I don’t recall reading about any uninstall functionality, but will look around. The one thing I did at the very end was to restore the database from the last file saved in my Dropbox backup.
Hi @Tim_Hartford ----- Thank you for the follow up. I would like to have you start fresh in your office configuration to see if we can trigger a change in behavior here using the restore function.
As mentioned, I would first like to get a better sense of the steps you took the first time around. Once I have that information we can continue forward from there
Sorry, have been busy at work and with family-related activities. Will try to get going on it this week. In the meantime, I have a question that may relate to this. I burned four Bill Evans CDs into iTunes and all of a sudden a Woody Shaw album I was playing at the time “disappeared”. The (multi-volume) album stopped playing and I got an “album not found” message (or something along those lines) and an Art Farmer album that was lined up in the queue also disappeared. So the queue was now empty. The spinning blue wheel in the upper left-hand corner implied that Roon was loading, or trying to find albums. I restarted Roon. Same problem. In fact When I went into Overview, I expected to see some recently added albums. What I saw was stuff from December. Then, I started to wonder why there’s a storage setting for iTunes Libraries (Roon 1.2 and older). I certainly didn’t set that up. Another path to an external drive that held my iTunes library that I did set up was missing. Confused. What’s going on with this?
I should add that I’m disabling this " iTunes Libraries (Roon 1.2 and older)" path and reestablishing the old path. Bad idea? Am I going to lose all that manual art, and album setup work I did before? I’m guessing you’re going to say “yes.”
Strangely enough, disabling the " iTunes Libraries (Roon 1.2 and older)" path and reestablishing the old path on my home machine, doing a backup and then restoring my office backup from this new backup seems to be doing the trick. Here are captures of the revised storage settings:
Home:
Work:
The work machine is currently updating so the number of tracks isn’t completely up to date yet. I think this is resolved.
Hi @Tim_Hartford ---- Thank you for the follow up! I just wanted to touch base and see how things are holding up after you performed the procedure highlighted in your most recent post.
@eric, so far, so good, but it’s only been a couple of hours. Thanks for asking. I’m curious if it has anything to do with the iTunes Library (Roon 1.2 and older) path designation. What are your thoughts? Thanks!
No worries @eric Just to clarify – the old (original) path (Timothy-Hartford-Mac-mini > Macintosh HD > Volumes > Newer Technology Guardian MAXimus > Music > iTunes Media > Music) seems to had been supplanted with a new path (iTunes Library (Roon 1.2 and older)) when I upgraded to 1.3. Could that have possibly happened as part of the upgrade process?
Attempting to remedy some recent issues mentioned above in the thread, regarding unfound albums I did the following:
• I reverted back to the old (original) path and disabled the iTunes Library (Roon 1.2 and older) path
• Then I backed up the DB with the reverted path settings
• Then I restored from that new DB at the office
And it worked. Make sense? It’s just not exactly clear to me why.
Just to clarify – the old (original) path (Timothy-Hartford-Mac-mini > Macintosh HD > Volumes > Newer Technology Guardian MAXimus > Music > iTunes Media > Music) seems to had been supplanted with a new path (iTunes Library (Roon 1.2 and older)) when I upgraded to 1.3. Could that have possibly happened as part of the upgrade process?