ROCK on nuc7i5BNH, 2TB internal, 128k m.2 for ROCK, 5TB USB external attached to nuc for backup.
Noticed a small updating problem with backups in Roon. Here’s the situation:
a. Scheduled Backups set to once every five days. It should have been done early this morning at 1AM, so this morning I checked. In the “Find Backups” selector. Please note the file path circled. In the KB it states that Roon makes a folder titled “RoonBackups” when a user makes their first backup. You can see the folder “RoonBackups” on the drive “Backup Plus”
b. I hit “select folder” (note I did not open the “RoonBackups” folder) and this is what it showed. Note the backup completed at 1:01:29. Pretty efficient backup!
c. I checked the “Scheduled Backups”. In the past I found that “scheduled Backups” needs the complete file path through to the “RoonBackups” folder. You will see the path to that folder and the completion time. Still everything is ok.
d. Now look at the screen for “Backup Status”. You can see it shows the same file path as for “Scheduled Backups” yet the last successful backup was on 9 May 2020.
And, should you think that there is duplication, i.e. that the “RoonBackups” folder is a folder-within-a-folder, I opened it using “Find Backups” and it shows the same backup completion as shown in b. above. So the scheduled backup is completing successfully (yeah, Roon!), but the counter for “last successful backup” isn’t counting it.
The line/entry you marked red here, doesn’t show up on my system. So I suspect that it’s related to the “Backup Now” functionality, correctly showing when you last pressed on “Backup” on the “Backup Now” line/entry.
You can see the corresponding backup confirmation for scheduled backups when you click on “View” for “Scheduled Backups” as seen on the screen you shared:
There is usually no need to mix these two backup strategies, at least not with the same backup folder. If you want to test “Scheduled Backups” or want to do an immediate backup into the same folder you can use the 3-dots menu on the corresponding scheduled backup and choose “Force Backup Now”.
The automatic creation of the RoonBackups folder seems to work only the first time when/if used on an empty folder. It’s possible to mess up here with the folder levels. See also previous discussion in:
That’s the reason I posted. This might be put in the hopper for 'cleanups" at the programming level. The issues don’t cause crashes, conflicts, or fidelity issues, but detract from usability.
The two issues are:
“Backup Manually” appears to create its own folder and not to update the date of most recent overall backup, not just the most recent manual backup.
Roon creates the RoonBackups folder itself the first time a user performs a backup, but after that both the manual backup utility and the scheduled backup utility need to be pointed to the RoonBackups folder itself specifically, or the double backup problem happens.
I still don’t get why one should do a manual backup into the same backup location as the scheduled backups go. It’s just asking for trouble.
AFAIK and as I tried to explain above, such a thing (most recent backup overall) doesn’t exist. IMHO you can see the most recent scheduled backup when you click on “View” for “Scheduled Backups” (only if a scheduled backup is configured and at least ran once) and you can see the most recent manual backup (only if a manual backup attempt was made) directly on the backup page under the “Backup Now” entry/line and that’s why I don’t have that as I never did a manual backup.
I look on “manual backup” the same as the “force backup” selection in Schedule Backups. For example, you set up or change a scheduled backup and want to see that the file path and location works. Force a backup or do a manual backup. You spend all day ripping some huge CD set or spend all day curating your Roon core for duplicates, orphan files, missing files, etc and now you don’t want to wait for the scheduled backup that is x days away. Force a backup or do a manual backup.
To me, they should be exactly the same. If the designers had something else in mind their reasoning is pretty opaque.
For me, logic dictates that if they were the same then the “Backup Now” wouldn’t exist (or at least not in it’s current state).
Note: A user can define more than just one “Scheduled Backup” and for the “Backup Now” the user has to define the backup location (button “Select Location …”) every time he wants to use it (I guess).
See also the KB-article about Backup, specifically:
Once your backup is configured, you’ll be able to see it on the Scheduled Backups screen. Click the “3 dots” menu to make changes to your backup, restore from your backup, or to kick off a backup immediately.
…
Backing Up Without A Schedule
If you don’t want backups to run automatically, you can also run a backup at anytime by clicking Backup Now, on the Backup tab in Settings.
Logic doesn’t dictate that at all. We all use programs every day that have more than one way of accomplishing the same task depending on user preference. What doesn’t make sense is having two ways to accomplish the same task with different outcomes.
Force Backup (in Scheduled Backups) and Backup Now should ideally accomplish the same task: backup to the same folder, keeping the same count, and tracking the same “last backup” date. Right now they operate as though they were written as two different utilities.
I don’t think they are the same thing at all.
My scheduled backups go to a backup NAS that then goes to sleep during the day.
If I’m doing something to roon that makes me think I should do a backup then I do a manual one to whatever is convenient at the time. If backup now were a submenu of schedule a load of users would probably never find it and not do backups at all.
