Is there a difference between the results of Roon backups and quitting the Core and using some other backup software—perhaps something that verifies backups, which Roon does not do?
What are you backing up? Just Roon’s database?
Yup. [extra words extra words]
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Roon Backups stops Roon and presumably checks the Roon database for consistency as it is backed up. If you are using an external backup program, you’ll have to make sure you stop your Roon Core manually during the backup to avoid backing up the Roon db in an inconsistent state, and even if you do, there are no consistency checks.
Roon does not do any checking, and I said in my original post that I would stop the core before backing up.
If the Roon database image on the core disk is in a corrupted state (because of a dirty shutdown, for instance), verified backup with Chronosync is not going to do anything but copy the corrupted database. In contrast, backup from Roon would not (I think) write out a database image that is in an inconsistent state. I don’t know Roon’s innards, of course, but I’m familiar with this from other object-oriented databases.
I don’t know technically what this means. What I do know is that roon will back up it’s database despite there being “corruption” errors in the logs. It will then keep on doing this if you have scheduled lets say a limit of 10 backups until all images are corrupt images. Any attempt to restore from any of these images will then fail. This has happened to me twice and there have been numerous posts describing the same use case.
Yes, of course.
What I am asking is if there is a difference in the structure or contents of the resulting backups using the two different methods.
Perhaps I should phrase my question differently.
Does Roon do anything special when it writes a backup, or does it, in effect, just clone the database to another location?
Edit:
I’m talking about full 1:1 backups, not differential or incremental backups.
All I know is time machine backups don’t work with Roon, for whatever reason. I don’t know how different technically ChronoSync is to time machine, but if Roon has a built in backup mechanism, I would choose it first over anything else… for Roon.
Roon’s backup mechanism isn’t good.
As has already been pointed out, Roon doesn’t check its own database for corruption before backing it up—obviously, this won’t be solved by using another backup method.
Roon also doesn’t do any verification on what it writes during a backup, and this is where another solution can be better.
When you’re copying 40+ GB of database files, it makes sense to verify that the copiea match the originals.
Time machine backups are incremental, so the result is not a mirror image of the current database; if I understand it correctly, you need the full backup plus each incremental backup since that full backup to reconstruct your current database. Roon (the software) doesn’t know about this, so such backups will fail to restore.
Yea, most people would choose it, but, as has been pointed out, when your database gets really large, Roon’s backup process can fail, and, when it does, it fails without notifying the user.
I’m not asking “How should I backup Roon’s database?”
I’m asking if, when running a Roon backup, Roon does anything other than an unverified copy of the database.