My apologies if I haven’t posted this in the right section.
It appears the internal HDD in my Salkstream III has failed (it contained Roonserver and music files). Salk is sending a new HDD with Linux and Roon loaded on it and will set it up remotely once I’ve replace the failed drive. I will be transferring my music files to the new drive as well.
I was reading this in the Roon Knowledgebase:
Step 3 mentions stopping Roonserver before transfer a large number of tracks to the new drive. I have no idea how to do that in the Salkstream. Roonserver boots up automatically when the Salkstream is turned on.
Does Roon actually start scanning the music files on the new drive if I haven’t logged into Roon yet or added a Watched Folder? If not, will I be ok transferring thousands of tracks to the new drive without stopping Roonserver?
In addition to my own local files, I subscribe to Qobuz and had many albums “added” to my collection. At what point do I log back into Qobuz?
Also, at what point do I restore my previous Roon database/settings backup?
The Knowledge base link I posted talks about what to do when moving music files to a new location, but doesn’t seem to address when replacing a drive with a new Roon installation as well as transferring music files and Roon backup to the new drive.
Can someone list the steps in order I need to take to assure success?
This scares me as my hard drive on my Salkstream III has failed (Salk sending a new drive).
I had Roon set to do an automatic backup once a week, and Roon has always reported them successful. Now I’m wondering what will happen when I try to restore it (yes, I’ve done quite a bit of curating).
I had Roon set up for weekly automatic backups to one external USB drive, and less often (once a month?) I would do a manual backup to a second portable USB drive that I kept offsite.
My music is also backed up to the two USB drives as well as a copy on my desktop PC.
It depends on what it would mean to you if you lost your curations.
The real problem, as I see it, is that Roon will backup a library that has ‘latent corruption’, i.e. corruption that won’t show up for a while. Having only a weekly backup leaves you open to having that corrupted library overlay any good backups.
You bring up a concern I have. When I restore a backup, should I just use the most recent? Or should I choose an older one in case the most recent (in this case 11-1-20, drive failed 11-3-20) is corrupt?
Also, unless one checks somehow, how would one know if any or all of their backups are corrupt? It seems if Roon reports corrupt backups as “Successful”, then it wouldn’t matter how many are done, no?
Generally I would use the most recent backup, but in your particular case you should probably rely on a backup before the drive failed.
If you look at my backup scheme you will see that I, eventually, could go as far back as 3 years. My other schedules can go back as far as 70, 60, 40,or 20 days.
Yes, I still could lose some recent curation, but I won’t lose all curation.
Until Roon addresses the potential for backing up corrupt libraries, then that’s the best I can do.
Looking closer at your backup schedule, I see what you are saying. Definitely good food for thought.
I mentioned I do a manual backup approximately monthly to a separate USB drive. Does Roon do a separate backup each time I do that or is the previous backup overwritten?
Looking at the Roon backup file on my second USB backup drive, it appears when doing a manual backup the previous backup file is overwritten unless you choose a differ backup location.
I noticed the last time I did a manual backup to that drive was Sept 21st. I thought I did one in Oct, but I guess not.
I backup to the same USB drive, same folder, and each backup remains and has it’s date. My older backups go away only if I manually delete them. (there may be a setting that tells roon to overwrite backups…not sure about that.)
Interesting. The external USB drive I use for automatic Scheduled Backups shows multiple backup dates like you are seeing. But the other drive I use to backup Roon using the Backup Now feature, only shows the last backup.
Are using the Scheduled Backup feature or Backup Now feature?
PS - My apologies for using potentially confusing terms. Looking at the Roon Knowledge base I see Backup Now and Manual Backup are very different things. For reference, I use Scheduled Backup to one drive and Backup Now to the other drive. I do not do a “manual backup” per the Knowledge Base.
That’s true to a point. My theory is that a corrupted library will be viable for only so long. By taking multiple backups in increasing intervals, I can wait it out, so to speak.
AFAIK, Roon will only overwrite backups in two instances. If you run out of space on your backup medium or if you exceed the number of backups you have specified in Settings==->Backups for any particular medium. When Roon overwrites, it will overwrite the oldest backup, obviously.
I’ve also thought that Roon missed a backup, but I could never prove to myself that it wasn’t my imagination.
I always check Settings==>Backups==>Scheduled Backups==>three dots==>Clean/Restore to see what backups are present.
For clarity, I’m not having any issues with using the Scheduled Backup feature to the first external USB drive. Multiple backups are showing on that drive as expected.
It’s using the Backup Now feature to the second external USB drive where I only see that last backup, indicating Roon is overwriting the previous backup.
I like your idea of checking Clean/Restore to verify Roon sees the backups. I haven’t been doing this. Today I just connected the two backup drives to my PC to see what files are present.
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. You can backup to the same location later, and Roon will only save the changes since the last backup. Later, you can restore any of the backups you have saved to that folder…”
One the one hand it says using Backup Now to the same location only saves changes since the last back. To me, this means there will only be one backup file in this case. But then it says you can restore “any of the backups you have saved to that folder”, which to me means all my backups using Backup Now should be there.
What am I not understanding?
I don’t know how it looks if I use Cleanup/Restore to look up backups on that drive. Would Roon actually show multiple backups there using Clean/Restore? Until I get my Salkstream up and running again, I can’t check it that way.
I have Roon do automatic backups of my Nucleus every night to an attached USB drive. I save the last 20 backups. It’s a total non-issue. I’ve only done a restore once and that was to my laptop and that was also a non-issue.
As far as I can tell neither condition has been met. The drive is well less than half full. I don’t remeber seeing a setting for number of backups to save using Backup Now like there is for Scheduled Backups.
I’ll certainly be doing some testing once my Salkstream is back up and running (new drive is on it’s way).
This whole situation just emphasizes the need for multiple backup locations in case something is wrong with one.
