Warning: Roon Backups are unreliable!

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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!

@Philip_Feenstra

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Hmm… interesting… I think the problem might be this…

When you ‘Add to my library’ an album from Tidal, it gets added to ‘My Collection’ in Tidal (If you log on to your Tidal account, or look in the Tidal app, you’ll see it is added to “my collection”). So… information is stored on the Tidal database that says you have added it to your ‘Tidal Collection”.

When you do a Roon Restore, Roon doesn’t cross-reference what was in your library when the backup was taken with what is currently in “My Collection” on Tidal and remove any content that was added after the backup was taken. I expect Roon just does the restore, then logs in to Tidal and reads what is currently stored on Tidal’s database “My collection” and correctly represents it in your Roon library.

Now… whether this is something that should happen is open to debate.

An example where this might be bad is…

I listen to Tidal when I’m out and about and I’ll sometimes add an album or a track to “my collection” via the Tidal app. Then… when I return home, it’s nice to see it in my Roon library as well.

If I then added content at home via Roon and made a mistake and decided to “roll back” my library, I would then lose all content added via the Tidal app since my last back up…

Maybe Roon could give us the option to lose all edits via Tidal since the last backup…?

If you filter your library to just show tidal albums you can select them all in one go and remove them.

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All TIDAL Collections are assigned a unique tag, e.g. TIDAL: R&B, TIDAL: Classical etc. Filter on these, select all, edit and delete en masse.

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Hi Dan,

Thank you for your input! And yes, you are right: It is the TIDAL favorites that are stored with TIDAL and added to the Roon database. So removing it from the TIDAL database it also removes (after a while) from the Roon database. When I use my iPad TIDAL app to do so, it only takes two finger clicks instead of 8 so this is 4 times better! When this was asked to me what I think of this functionality it could be removed from Roon.

I agree with you that when I am listening to TIDAL in my car to work and I add an album to my TIDAL favorites it is nice that it also adds to Roon’s database. They should keep that.

Philip

Hi, Thank you for joining the discussion.

You have to explain your point because I do not get it completely. Yes I can choose "Albums and “Focus”, “Format” and “TIDAL”. And yes then I have all my TIDAL favorite albums that has been added to the Roon database. But no I cannot remove them all at once and no I really do not want to do that, because I have 1300+ TIDAL favorites and I only want to remove the last 50 added.

Philip

Martin,

I try to see your point but is unclear what you mean. Yes, I have tags that I have added myself. This is a very useful one. But no other filters (i.e. like I expected the tagged collection that I want to remove) are not listed here.

Philip

You can focus on date added (ie. ‘in the last day’ is an option) + Tidal, and then select all and delete. That should work if you inadvertently add a load of albums you didn’t want.

Focus can have multiple options applied at once, it’s very powerful that way.

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I know how to select them, bu I do not see a way tp delete them from the database other than selectong the album, select “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.

Using the Album browser and Focus, with both TIDAL and date range selection criteria, to give you the display of all the TIDAL albums that you want to delete.

Then right-click (or long press, if you’re using a tablet) on an album to get the menu bar with the “1 album selected” message at the top of the window. You’ll see a downward point arrow by the “1 selected”; click on that and choose “Select All”. Now you can delete all the albums in one go…

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If you wish to reverse this, you can without deleting individual albums one at a time. Simply select the appropriate tags (auto-created when you added the TIDAL collections), select all (Ctrl-A), and delete. Hopefully, you will understand after seeing these screenshots.

NB. I created TIDAL: Master.

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Thank you, Martin,

This is a very useful instruction how to undo the “Add Albums…” action. Completely clear now.
Enjoy your day!

Philip

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Hi, plugged in a ssd portable drive. Roon see the connected drive , I can select the folder but I get an error message invalid path or another similar notice? How can I fix this?