Spontaneous Full-Rebuilds of DB?

Every now and again (it’s very rare, but this has happened under several release builds), my Roon DB will freak out, and do a full rebuild causing all albums to be added ‘today’. It sometimes gets caused by a new album being added, but sometimes it happens when the source drive gets unmounted (MacOS has been terrible about keeping external drives mounted after waking from sleep these days).

I ‘fix’ it by simply loading a backup, and boom all is well in Roonland (always keep several backups). I may have to add some additional albums depending on the time of the last backup, but that’s usually not a biggie.

Does anyone have this issue?

I think you have answered your own question. Search for this issue, it seems not exactly uncommon with OSX and external storage. I presume that all Roon is doing is a full rescan, having just ‘discovered’ some new storage when it reconnects? If it did a ‘full rebuild’ you would lose all edits etc and that would probably be a different issue.

That’s just it. It is losing all the edits. It’s like “new phone, who dis?”.

Roon is fully capable of dealing with external storage that may be offline. When it comes back, everything is just ‘there’. This situation is different.

OK thanks for clarifying. Looks like a job for @support .

Hello @CM_Harrington,

Thanks for contacting support, I do apologize that you are facing this issue, this behavior does sound a bit erratic. How often do you notice the re-build occurring? One a week? More? Less?

I would like to take a closer look when this issue occurs, I have gone ahead and enabled diagnostics mode on your account and the next time your core is active a set of logs will automatically be generated and uploaded to our servers for analysis. What I kindly ask of you is to note the exact local time in your country (ex.12:30PM) when you see this issue happening and then we can cross-reference to see if Roon is outputting any errors at that time.

Please let me know once you are able to reproduce this issue and I can confirm we have what we need in the diagnostics report. After we receive that diagnostics info QA will likely have to take a closer look at them to identify possible issues so I have gone ahead and started the initial case for you with them. Please let me know the above when possible.

Thanks,
Noris

To be clear, this happens very rarely. It’s happened only about 3-4 times since I started being a Roon user… maybe 2 years?? I’ve forgotten. So while I’ll try to describe the exact scenario when it happens, please note that it may be months before it happens again.

Hello @CM_Harrington,

I apologize about the slight delay in getting back to you here and thanks for letting me know that time-frame. Hmm, since it only has happened about 3-4 times in 2 years, I’m thinking that this may be related to when you performed updates of the Roon Core application that caused the re-build? Have you noticed the issue around those times or did the re-builds just seem to randomly occur due to no other external variables? Are you experiencing any other issues where Roon doesn’t seem to perform as expected or just the occasional re-builds? If you notice this issue again please let us know so that we can take a look at the diagnostic info for any clues as to why this behavior occurs as it does certainly seem strange to me.

Thanks,
Noris

No worries about the delay. As I mentioned, it’s not a showstopping bug, just a strange anomaly.

To answer your question, it specifically does not occur in-or-around new versions of the core or other software updates. It seems to trigger (based on my memory) when the source drive has been disconnected for a time (it’s a NAS controlled by a Mac mini Core connected directly via Ethernet), reconnected, then minutes later adding additional items to watch folders, which normally causes the DB to scan and update, but very rarely will trigger the full rebuild action.

That isn’t 100% always the trigger, but I think the full rebuild issue is always triggered by some sort of manual (user initiated) event happening (adding music to a watch folder, as an example).

Hello @CM_Harrington,

Thanks for providing us that additional information. Unfortunately, the best and only way to narrow down what could be causing this issue is by analyze Roon’s log files at the time that you experience this problem.

Once we have log files, we can see an issue much more clearly and if there is no way to reproduce this issue at will, not much can be done on our end. With that said, if you do experience this issue again, please feel free to send us log files according to our instructions listed on this Knowledge Base article.

If you do want to play around with disconnecting and reconnecting your NAS and watched folders to try to trigger the full rebuild, I gladly encourage you to do so (provided you still are making regular backups in case something goes wrong). If you are able to get back into the full rebuild state, please let me know, otherwise we will have to wait for it to occur again and troubleshoot it only after it happens. I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Noris