I searched here, but can’t determine what is inside the Roon DB. Obviously User Settings and play counts and hearts/stars, genres, album art… Everything but the art should be really small, but my DB is absolutely massive (~50 GB*, which must mostly be art). Almost all of my music (FLAC) files have embedded artwork.
Will my DB size go down if I set a global “use my artwork” switch?
Is there any other way to trim the fat so that restores don’t fail every time?
I didn’t think artwork was stored in the DB anymore? It used to be but a while back I recall it was moved out to a separate folder and just linked to keep DB from growing. My DB ended up a lot smaller as a result. ROCK say I have ‘92% of 107GB available’ on the SSD and I’m sure that used to be more like 60% before the change. That is for 150k tracks. I haven’t looked at the DB backup sizes though as they live on a NAS (out of sight out of mind).
EDIT: I think this change happened at the time Art Director was introduced.
Anyway, it’s not years, it’s less than a year since the last time the db wouldn’t load, and the backups wouldn’t restore. I’ve rebuilt from scratch several times.
Does that mean that it’s not in the backups, either? I have a fresh backup that’s 29GB. (Or 65GB, I’m not sure why the numbers don’t match. Invisible files? —see screenshot above)
I had a quick look but couldn’t see a support request for this … I’d recommend creating one so that Roon (who are the only people that can help) can get to the root cause of this failure.
On the DB size that does sound very large, how many tracks are in your library?
Play history, is trivial compared to mesh of metadata that the Roon DB holds.
As a test, you could stop Roon Server, rename the DB folder, restart Roon and let it rebuild / reindex your music collection. Once completed compare the new DB size with that of the old.
I’m not really interested in a weeks-to-months-long back-and-forth with Roon Support, building rebuilding my database and losing all my work. I’ve been down that road before.
Fair enough. Thanks for your thoughts. I’ll stop thinking about it and go back to occasionally dreading the day that my DB fails again. From what I’ve been able to gather from talking to Roonies in the past, my library is really too big for Roon to handle well.
Have you ever tried to make split backups?
Just thinking out loud.
E.g. I have 4 watched storage locations. I could disable 3 of them, and make a new backup.
I then would repeat the process for the 3 other locations, making sure not to overwrite the previous ones.
I have never (need3d to) test this, but maybe worthwhile to try? The only thing you loose is diskspace (and a little bit of time)
Question remains how to restore in different steps
I think that your final question negates the utility of this approach.
Before that, I would have to build separate fresh databases for each storage location, or else the DB would already contain all the stuff… Seems like a good way to waste a solid week. I like your thinking, though!
Disabling a watched folder would not reduce the size of the DB, unless library cleanup was performed.
However that would be a catastrophic mistake as it would then delete all the links from DB for the affected tracks and there’s no going back from that (apart from restoring an older intact DB backup).
This is not possible, only one of the DB’s could be restored at any one time.
And given above it would be moot anyware.
