Hi! What’s not quite right with Roon?
· None of the above quite fits
None of the above quite fits
· None of these quite match
Tell us what's going on
· Unable to backup database
Tell us about your home network
· USB backup
@sschmidt - welcome to the Roon forum 
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Please provide more details to get help here: version, operating system, how you are backing up and errors you get etc …
Hi Mark,
Just bought the Nucleus One (version 2.66, build 1658). Added a 2 TB WD internal drive. Everything was working fine for the past few days. Decided to start my first database backup to an external USB drive (OWB) dedicated to the Nucleus, no music files. I followed the Roon online help and watched videos. I made a folder (Roon Backups). Everything seemed to going as directed. The Roon selected folder path is Nucleus One > OWC > Roon Backups. Roon asks to choose folder. I selected Roon Backups and get the following message: “Backup failed. Can not find the backup directory.”
I am using an iphone 13, running OS 26.4.2. The OWC HD is Mac OS Extended (case sensitive, journaled).
Permissions are write/read.
Thanks,
Scott
I don’t think that the Nucleus can write to Mac OS Extended (HFS+) disks, although it can read them.
Devices connected directly to Nucleus by USB
If your music is stored on an external USB drive, plug it into your Nucleus now. Nucleus supports USB drives pre-formatted as EXT2/3/4, VFAT/FAT32/FAT16/exFAT, NTFS, or HFS/HFS+. Note that HFS/HFS+ (also known as “Mac OS Journaled”) is read-only, which means that the Nucleus will not be able to make changes or store new music on the USB drive.
Whilst this refers to music, it seems reasonable to assume that a drive used for backups would face the same limitation.
Scott, as @Calum_Mackay points out, your external drive should be formatted per that link.
If there’s nothing already on your OWC drive, then you can safely reformat it using Apple’s Disk Utility; please do say if you need help with this 
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I may be misremembering, but I don’t think the target directory should have a space in its name; so ‘RoonBackups’. You might have to set the target location to its parent/enclosing directory if it fails again.
Good luck!
Thanks Calum and Mark,
I’ll give it a try.
The link says pre-format: “EXT2/3/4, VFAT/FAT32/FAT16/exFAT, NTFS, or HFS/HFS+. Note that HFS/HFS+ (also known as “Mac OS Journaled”) is read-only.”
My Mac format options are:
APFS
APFS Encrypted
APFS case sensitive
APFS encrypted, case sensitive
MAC OS Ext Journaled
MAC OS Cas Sensitive Journaled
ExFAT
MC DOS (FAT)
Use the ExFAT format option.
Hello @sschmidt,
Welcome to the Roon community, and congratulations on your new Nucleus One! It’s great that you are setting up your backups right away.
While the Nucleus (which runs on a specialized Linux operating system called Roon OS) can read music from an Apple Mac OS Extended (HFS+) drive, it cannot write files to it. Since a database backup requires Roon to write new data to the drive, it is failing with that error message because it simply doesn’t have the write-permissions at the filesystem level.
Since your external OWC drive is dedicated to backups and currently empty, you can easily reformat it on your Mac to make it compatible with both your Mac and the Nucleus One:
- Connect the OWC drive to your Mac.
- Open Disk Utility (you can find this using Spotlight search).
- Select your OWC drive from the list on the left.
- Click Erase at the top.
- Name the drive (e.g.,
NucleusBackup- pro-tip: avoid spaces in the name). - Under Format, select ExFAT.
- Click Erase.
Once that is done, plug the drive back into the USB port on your Nucleus One. Go into Roon, recreate your backup folder, and try to run the backup again. It should now have the full read/write access required to save your database!
Let us know if you run into any other hurdles!
I partitioned and formatted the drive as exFAT. Seems to be working.
Thanks Calum and Mark!