What Exactly is the Backup Backing up?

I’m in the process of setting up my new Nucleus and was wondering about the backup function.

Is the backup backing up all of the music that I’ve installed on the internal hard drive?

Is it just backing up my settings or something else?

How much memory is required for a backup?

Can I plug a thumb drive into the back of the Nucleus and use that for the backup?

Thanks for your help.

Hi, Check out https://kb.roonlabs.com/Backup

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Thanks Carl, that page is very helpful but it doesn’t say how much memory is required for a backup.

The size of the backup depends on how many tracks, albums, artist etc. are in your library … my Roon backup is 132 GB but that’s for 99 copies … so that’s circa 13GB per backup.

I don’t foresee a problem using a thumb drive (memory stick) but they are quite slow so it might take a while for the backup to complete.

I think you just need to experiment and see if the performance is acceptable or not.

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@Carl, Although I have my music stored on the Nucleus’ SSD, would I also be able to use that for the backup if there is space available on it?

I plug a USB drive in the Nucleus for backups. Unplug it when not is use.

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You can but it’s not advised by Roon.

If you have a NAS, backup to there it’s simple to setup or setup up a Dropbox account and use that as you can set that up from the UI. Or get a small USB disk and attach it or use a stick.

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Are you talking about a thumb drive?

I’m not crazy about the idea of unplugging it and then plugging it back in when I’m going to listen to music. :thinking:

I’ll look into Dropbox too. I like the idea of a thumb drive but @Carl says they’re slow for backups. I don’t know if that would present a problem for me though.

You can use any usb drive doesn’t have to be a thumb one. Get a cheap usb HDD then you just plug it in the back and leave it. Take it out once a week and make another backup of that somewhere else. You cant have too many copies.

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You don’t need to plug it in to listen to music. It’s only plugged in when you are doing a backup. And just checking given this comment: You do understand that your MUSIC is not backed up. Only the Roon database information related to your music files. You definitely need to separately provide a backup (or two!) for the actual MUSIC files.

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No, it’s a 1TD HDD I had and mounted in a case. I leave the USB cable plugged in and just plug and unplug the HDD. It does the backup in a matter of seconds. I tried Dropbox and it was entirely too slow. There is no music on it. It’s just a backup of Roon, whatever than includes.

What little bit of music I have is on the Nucleus 1TB SSD I installed in the Nucleus. The originals are in my Music folder on my laptop.

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Thanks for that. Actually, no, I didn’t know that the music I’ve put on the internal drive wasn’t backed up. It’s really good to know that! I imagine that just the Roon database information wouldn’t require a whole lot of memory. That’s my guess anyway.

Hi @NipperDog,

As others have noted, I would definitely suggest getting a separate USB drive for Roon backups + music file backups. You can keep this drive always connected to the Nucleus and set up periodic backups of your database and do a one-time backup of your music library.

The size of the backups can differ based on your library size and how many copies you keep. I would get a drive the size of your current internal storage on Nucleus + an extra 100GB at the very minimum. Hard drives are fairly cheap these days, so always get more than you think you’ll need rather than less.

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