I own a Devialet Expert Pro 250 + Core Infinity streaming board. A Mac mini which runs the Roon Core on SSD and a QNAP TS-253A NAS. I have about 3000+ albums stored on the NAS uncompressed Flac and DSD. I have about 1300 or more favorite albums on TIDAL added to my Library. My backups are stored on both the QNAP as the Mac mini. I am very satisfied with this configuration and Roon’s software works great! I am a life time Roon member.
I have experienced difficulties however restoring Roon Backups. I discussed matters earlier with Eric Stewart (@eric) from Roon and he and his team did all to help solving my corrupted database. Unfortunately it did not work however, so I started with a new database twice so far. I suffered lost album artwork, lost favorites, and order of “ Date Added” was distorted.
This time I was exploring the possibilities in TIDAL. In Roon I choose “TIDAL” and: “TIDAL Collection”. In TIDAL Collection I selected some categories and incidentally I choose “Add Albums To My TIDAL Library”. Oops… I better should not have done that! What happens is not what I want because now I have added a whole list of albums to my library, which I don’t want to see because I will never play them.
In Roon I have always sorted the albums “Sorted by Date Added”. Naturally this is what you do with your vinyl collection generally because new purchased albums you would like to play more. I think most users will dot that.
So now I want to remove them from my library. I now have two options:
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I choose the album to remove, click on the three dots, choose “Edit” and “Hide Album”. This is the quick way, but now the album will never show up again in Roon until all hidden TIDAL albums are unhidden again.
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Alternatively I may choose “Edit” and “Delete Album”. Now I have to click on “Delete # Tracks” and I have to confirm this with “This action cannot be undone” and “These tracks will be removed from your TIDAL favorites”. This has to be repeated for all unwanted albums. This is the best way to do since now the album can be found again in TIDAL after this action. These action requires 8 clicks on my iPad!
Since method 1. gives an unwanted effect and 2. is very labor intensive I like to restore by last Backup because all was fine before my action “Add Albums To My TIDAL Library”. But after I have restored the Backup all the unwanted albums are still added in my library.
My conclusion is that:
Restoring Roon backup does not completely restore the situation as it was before. Be really careful when you change your network and IP-addresses. Know what you do when you intend to migrate to a new storage system.
My suggestion is:
Give the user more insight and a choice what will be restored. Why not choose for keeping the database and restore the network settings only? Why not locate the Album Artwork somewhere that I can be restored?
I m interested to know for what is stored Library folders: Roonserver, Roonmounts, and Roongoer, but it would be much better if the user can choose for a complete reliable restore or to restore what he wants.
Please join this discussion and @eric I would like to hear your opinion too! Roon is almost perfect but improve the Backup reliability please!