Unable to Restore Backup After Upgrading Roon OS on NUC (ref#H7O7QK)

[Scott_Romans (scott101660)]

Hi! What’s not quite right with Roon?

· Music won’t play or issues with my library

Music won’t play or issues with my library

· Trouble creating or restoring backups

Tell us what's going on

· I recently reinstalled Roon ROCK on my Intel NUC10i7 to upgrade from Roon OS 1.0 (legacy BIOS boot) to Roon OS 2.1 (UEFI boot) in order to enable Tailscale support for Roon ARC. Before reinstalling I created a Roon database backup.

After reinstalling and updating to Roon OS 2.1 / Roon Server 2.64, I am unable to restore my backup. The Find Backups function consistently returns “No backup found” regardless of which folder level I select.

The backup is on a USB drive (called UNTITLED) and has the following structure:

Roon Backups/ (contains roon_backup_root file and one alphanumeric subfolder)

The alphanumeric subfolder contains many short subfolders (00, 0a, etc.) and files called roon_backup and name

Total backup size is approximately 116MB

I have tried the following without success:

Pointing Find Backups at the USB drive root, the Roon Backups folder, and the alphanumeric subfolder

Adding the ROCK network share via smb://rock/Data/Backup and trying all folder levels

Copying the backup to the ROCK’s Data/Backup folder and trying all folder levels

I am using a MacBook Pro for the restore attempt. Roon’s Find Backups browser only shows network shares — it does not show local Mac storage — so I have been unable to try restoring from a local copy.

Can you confirm whether this backup structure is valid? And if so, is there an alternative restore method that bypasses the Find Backups browser?

Thank you.

Tell us about your home network

· My router is Protectli VP2420 running OPNsense version 26.1.8. I do not run a VPN on the network as a whole, only on my computing devices.

[noris]

Hello @Scott_Romans ,

Thanks for reaching out. Can you please upload the backup you have to our Uploader linked below, and let us know once it’s uploaded? We will check the backup on our end.

https://workdrive.zohoexternal.com/collection/nocvrfc5b2ddab55140af8640f1d7ce13291e/external

[noris]

Hey, @Scott_Romans,

Just checking in on this. Were you able to upload the backup to the uploader link we sent and let us know once it was done? Once we have it, we can take a look on our end, so please reply here with any updates or questions, thanks.

[Scott_Romans (scott101660)]

Thank you for your response. Yes, I did upload the file “_roon_backup_root_”. In addition to this file, the Restore folder had another folder with a bunch of numbers and letters, and this folder contained a ton of subfolders. But your upoader seemed to only want to upload files and not folders, so I only uploaded _roon_backup_root_. Please let me know if you need me to do something else.

Scott

[vadim]

Hi @Scott_Romans,

Thanks for uploading the file! The uploader does support folders - you just need to compress the entire backup first.

Please zip the whole “Roon Backups” folder (the top-level one, which contains the roon_backup_root file and the alphanumeric subfolder) and upload the resulting .zip file to the same uploader link. On a Mac you can right-click the folder and select Compress.

Once we have the full archive we’ll be able to verify the backup structure on our end.

[Scott_Romans (scott101660)]

Okay, thank you very much. I have zipped the file and uploaded it using the link that was sent to me earlier. I look forward to your response.

[connor]

Hi @Scott_Romans,

Let’s do some due diligence on mounting problems.

Can you please confirm the format (NSFT, exFAT) for this WD drive?

Have you confirmed it’s mounted as Storage in the ROCK webUI or Roon Settings → Storage outside of Backups?

Lastly, try to mount macOS locally as a network share. Verify in System Settings → General → Sharing → File Sharing that it’s toggled on for Roon. Now copy your Backup location to a local folder.

Then in Roon → Backups → Find Backups, add smb://[Mac-IP]/[ShareName] and navigate to the Roon Backups folder.

[Scott_Romans (scott101660)]

I’m sorry, but now I am having a much more basic problem, which is that the Roon app cannot find my Roon server. Neither can I connect with the server using the IP address. I have rebooted the server several times and still I cannot connect. Are you able to help with this?

[noris]

Hello @Scott_Romans ,

Are you still able to access the Web UI for the unit? Are you able to connect to it via another PC and see the Data folder? According to our systems, the ROCK looks like it was recently online. We’ve also just enabled diagnostics, so if you can bring it back online, logs may help.

[Scott_Romans (scott101660)]

I think I thoroughly fried the NUC that was running my Roon server, so I ordered a Nucleus One and it just arrived. I’ll need a bit of time to get it set up, but then I’ll go back to the question about the backups.

[vadim]

Hello @Scott_Romans,

No worries - take your time getting the Nucleus One set up. Once it is up and running, come back here and we will pick up the backup restore question from where we left off.

[Scott_Romans (scott101660)]

Okay, I now have Roon running on Nucleus One with my external storage connected. The USB thumb drive with the backups folder is formatted as exFAT. If you are asking about the format of the external drive that stores my library, how do I do that?
Under Storage, my Library shows like this: Nucleus One > RoonLibrary.
I was able to mount the Backup folder as a network share, and I was able to access it on the side panel, along with the Backup folder on the USB drive (see below):

However, when I select either folder to restore from, I get the same error message, just like before: “No backups found. Please check your backup location.” Just a further note, when I click on either of those folders (USB drive or network share), the file structure of the backup can be seen in the right-hand panel (see below):

Thanks for your help.

[Robert_F (Rob)]

@Scott_Romans what does your “\\192.168.1.49\RoonBackups\” directory look like? I believe you are trying to backup from one folder too deep, instead of selecting just “\\192.168.149\RoonBackups\”.

[Scott_Romans (scott101660)]

Thank you, Robert. I get the same response whether I select just the network share or the folder that is in the first layer below the network share. Same for the USB drive.

[Robert_F (Rob)]

OK, thanks for confirming. Let’s see what Roon says when they return on Monday.

[vadim]

Hello @Scott_Romans,

Thanks for your patience, and thanks @Robert_F for helping narrow this down.

Let’s verify one specific thing: the folder you select in Find Backups must directly contain a file named roon_backup_root. That file is the marker Roon looks for - if it’s missing at the selected level, Roon reports “No backups found” even when the rest of the structure is intact.

So the expected layout is: the folder you point Roon at contains the roon_backup_root file, and next to it the alphanumeric subfolder (which in turn holds the short 00, 0a, etc. subfolders).

Could you check, on both the USB drive and the network share, whether the _roon_backup_root_ file is actually present at that level? When a backup gets copied between drives, this file occasionally gets missed. A screenshot of the folder contents in Finder, with that file visible, would help us confirm.

If the file is present at the correct level in both locations and the restore still fails, we’ll examine the archive you uploaded earlier and verify the backup’s integrity on our end.

Thanks!

[Scott_Romans (scott101660)]

Yes, both backup locations have a file called “_roon_backup_root_”. Please see screenshots below:

[benjamin]

Hey @Scott_Romans,

Thanks for your patience through the hardware swap, and for the detailed screenshots, they helped. Now that the Nucleus One is online we pulled fresh diagnostics from it, and they let us narrow this down considerably.

The good news first: the mechanics of the restore are all working correctly. On both the USB stick and the network share, Roon mounts the location, reads it successfully, and finds your backup set, the roon_backup_root marker is being detected and the folder level you’re selecting is correct. So none of the things we’d normally chase here (drive format, permissions, pointing one folder too deep) are actually the problem.

The issue is one level deeper. When Roon opens your backup set and looks inside for the individual restore points, it finds zero of them, every attempt comes back “successful, but 0 backups.” In other words, the container is intact and the content folders (00, 0a, etc.) and the roon_backup/name files are all physically there, but the index that lists your actual restorable snapshots is empty or unreadable. That’s why re-pointing Find Backups at different folders never changes the result.

This almost always means the backup data itself was damaged or left incomplete, most commonly when a backup is copied between drives (in your case NUC → USB → network share → ROCK).

Do you by any chance still have the original backup as it was first written (on the old NUC’s drive, or the very first copy you made), before it was moved around between drives? If so, try restoring directly from that copy, without any intermediate copying. A clean original may still have its index intact even if the later copies lost it.

One reassurance in the meantime: your music files themselves are completely safe, and your Nucleus One has already built a working library from them. What this backup would restore is your Roon-specific data, playlists, tags, edits, and play history , so nothing is lost from your actual music collection while we sort this out.

Thank you!

[Scott_Romans (scott101660)]

Hello and thanks for the response. If the “original” backup is the one on the NUC, then I don’t have access to that; separately from the issue of this backup, I have seemed to fried my NUC; I get zero response when I try to boot it and I actually cannot even do a fresh install of the ROCK operating system. But besides this, I made the backups directly before I updated the operating system to 2.0 so that I could use Tailscale. I think the backup would have been deleted when I upgraded to 2.0, so even if I had access the NUC I wouldn’t have access to the original backup. This started when I tried to restore after updating to 2.0. All I have are the backup copies on flash drive and various places in the cloud and other devices.

[benjamin]

Hey @Scott_Romans,

Sorry to hear the NUC is truly done, and thanks for the clear rundown of what you do and don’t still have. That actually helps us narrow the path forward.

First, one reassurance: the version isn’t the problem here. A backup created on your older setup is fully compatible with Roon Server 2.0/2.1, backups carry forward across these versions, so restoring an older backup onto your Nucleus One is expected to work. The “0 backups found” result isn’t a version mismatch; it points to the backup set’s index, which we’ll dig into below.

One clarification that matters here: the “original” we’re after isn’t necessarily the NUC itself. It’s whichever copy Roon wrote directly when you created that backup, versus copies you made by hand afterward. So when you ran the backup right before the 2.0 upgrade, where did Roon write it to, was the USB flash drive the actual backup destination you selected inside Roon, or did you copy the backup onto the USB drive after the fact? If the USB was Roon’s direct target, then it’s effectively as “original” as it gets, and the empty index on it tells us the set was likely incomplete at the moment it was written.

Either way, the copies you have aren’t guaranteed to be identical. Depending on how each cloud/device copy was made, one of them may still carry an intact index even if the USB copy doesn’t. So two things would help:

1. Try restoring directly from each independent copy you have (cloud, other devices), not copied onto the USB first, but pointed at from wherever it currently lives. If any one of them shows restore points, we're in business.
2. Pick the copy that was made most independently from the others, zip the whole top-level Roon Backups folder, and upload it to the same uploader link. We'll inspect it alongside the archive you sent earlier and confirm exactly which piece of the index is missing or damaged, that way you'll know precisely what to look for across your remaining copies.

Thank you! 👍