Watched Folder Clarification

[robert_vanarsdall]

I’m running ROCK on a nuc7i5BNH running on a home network. I import music into Roon using iTunes (old habits die hard), and so have the iTunes library stored on the nuc and have Roon monitoring the iTunes folder.

I looked at “Storage” in Roon and saw this:

Roon is showing two monitoring folders, the ROCK internal storage and the iTunes folder. But the iTunes folder is inside the ROCK internal storage. I made the mistake some time in the past of enabling both. Roon immediately doubled the number of files and albums. All I had to do was to disable the iTunes path and things went back to normal.

Here is the question, though. Roon sets up its monitored folder in ROCK internal storage, but doesn’t show anything further in the hierarchy. Which folder within the internal storage is Roon monitoring?. To illustrate, here is the Windows Explorer version of my ROCK:

According to Roon, the path ends with “ROCK Internal Storage”. Yet you can see there are 8 subfolders beneath that. Maybe it is just “Storage”, right? Except within Storage there are two more subfolders, “Backup Plus” and “Internal Storage”. In my case Backup Plus is an external USB HDD to backup the entire library folder plus Roon. Obviously “Internal Storage” subfolder “iTunes” is what I want, but then that is what I’d previously designated as in the first picture.

Is there any benefit to going one way or the other, ie just let Roon take care of it or designate exactly which folder I want monitored?

[Rugby (aka Daniel or Big Dan)]

@robert_vanarsdall

Which folder within the internal storage is Roon monitoring

Roon is automatically watching the entire drive for the Internal Storage Drive. That is why you can’t use the internal drive for say, Roon Database backups. External USB drives don’t have the same issue, since you have to setup the watched drive specifically.

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

@Rugby

Roon is automatically watching the entire drive for the Internal Storage Drive

Yes, but this internal storage drive is mounted in the folder tree as
\\ROCK\Data\Storage\InternalStorage

That’s why when copying music to the internal storage, you copy it into this InternalStorage folder.

If you attach an external USB drive and add it as additional storage, it gets mounted under \\ROCK\Data\Storage\ as an additional separate folder, next to the InternalStorage folder, like
\\ROCK\Data\Storage\<DRIVE_ID>
or, in @robert_vanarsdall case,
\\ROCK\Data\Storage\Backup Plus

@robert_vanarsdall This may seem odd if you are not used to Unix or Linux devices. In Unix/Linux, there are no silly drive letters as in Windows. Instead, the whole folder tree has one root, the “/” folder.

Starting there, it contains lower level folders and subfolders, as you would expect. But (different to Windows), additional drives can be “mounted” anywhere as a folder. For instance, in a Unix/Linux system you can have home folders per user like

/home
/home/user1
/home/user2

They all could be stored on one main drive, but you could also add an additional drive and then mount this drive as /home/user1 while /home/user2 could remain on the main drive. And later you can add yet another drive and mount it as /home/user2. This way, the users don’t need to worry about separate drives or drive letters, they simply use their home folders as usual and the fact that they actually are separate drives is abstracted away.

In the same way, ROCK’s internal storage drive is mounted into the folder tree at \\ROCK\Data\Storage\InternalStorage, so that anything inside of InternalStorage is on the internal storage drive and this is what is automatically watched by Roon, but \\ROCK\Data\Storage and anything else (any other additional, external disks with their own folders) below it is not.

[robert_vanarsdall]

Very clear explanation - thanks.

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

I should add that, therefore, the \\ROCK\Data\ folder itself, and the other folders in it, like Codecs, MachineSettings, RAATServer, and so on, are still on the primary drive, so you shouldn’t store anything there (except the ffmpeg codec file in Codecs), as it would fill up the primary drive. Same for \\ROCK\Data\Storage\ itself.