Grimm MU1 Making Roon Backups User Guide

Making Roon backups using the MU1
Manual for making Roon backups using the MU1
Justin Vis
25. Aug. 2023

Introduction

Making backups of your Roon database regularly is good practice for several reasons. In this manual we describe how to make backups and we provide some additional information.
Before we start, we like to refer to the official information about making backups on the Roon knowledge base: https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/backup

What is in the backup?
Roon builds a database about the music collection that you have, this contains your playlists, the Roon settings, the audio device setup and most of all the ‘meta data’ of the music you have in your library. These are not audio files but information about these files. This metadata is what makes Roon such strong software, it contains a wide variety of information like artist info, images and songtexts that Roon finds for you online.
There is also various technical information in the database, such as album and track loudness. For this Roon needs to analyse the audio data of your local files. It takes a while to do such an audio analysis on all the tracks in the library. A big library (20.000 tracks+) takes about 24 hours for the MU1 to index. More information about this can be found in the Roon knowledge base: https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/audio-analysis
Furthermore Roon keeps track of what you listen to and what you like. Unlike with other services this data is stored locally and not shared (sold) as ‘big data’. This data is also in the database. Please note that the music itself is not in the Roon backup. If you lke to make a backup of your music tracks, you need to mount the music disk via the network in your computer and use a generic backup application on your computer. If your music is on a USB drive, just connect the USB drive directly to your computer to make the backup.

Why make backups?
All this data takes time to collect. In case the database gets corrupted and you need to ‘reset’ it, you have to wait on this data collecting process again. A Roon database can grow to a few gigabyte easily. Our 30k track database is 24GB in size! If you have backups that can be restored, the scanning of the files does not have to be repeated.
Roon has an option to make scheduled backups. This function will make a backup on an interval you can set yourself. It is recommended to use this option since the database usually keeps growing, especially when you use a Streaming Service such as Qobuz or Tidal.

Selecting the location

When making a backup, once or scheduled, you need to select a location. As users don’t have direct access to the complete filesystem of the MU1 it is important that the right location is chosen. There are 2 or 3 options for the location:

1. Using Dropbox
2. Using network storage / NAS
3. If you have the optional Music SSD disk installed: Using the Music disk.

Dropbox

Roon offers the option to use a Dropbox account to store your backups. How to do this is quite self explainatory when following Roon’s guidelines and it is not unique for the MU1. Please note that the backups can become quite big and that the Dropbox API is quite slow. For this reason, Roonlabs discourages to use Dropbox for backups.

Network storage / NAS

If you have a NAS in your network, you can select this as your backup drive. This is the recommended option. A NAS is usually a big storage device which has plenty of space for multiple backups. Storing in the network is slower than storing on the interal SSD but making backups to a NAS can be done overnight.
Adding a NAS to Roon for backup is similar to using it for music storage.
If you like you make use of a NAS, please read this Roon knowledge base item about this topic: https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/faq-what-s -the-best-way-to-configure-my-nas-for-roon

Music disk

If you have the optional internal SSD installed in your MU1, it can be used for saving the backups next to your music files. If you like you can then access the database backup over the network and copy it to other locations for long-term storage. This procedure is described in the next pages, if you have already added the Music disk to Roon for music playback you can skip the first part of the text.

Add the HEAP / Music disk to Roon.
This procedure is described in the MU1 software manual in more detail, please read that manual if you run into problems. You can find it under Downloads on the MU1 product page on our website.
Go to the Roon menu using the menu button, in the menu go to Settings.
Go to submenu Storage and click on:
Here, select the HEAP disk on the left and press the Select This Folder button:

Press the Add button in the next screen.

Setting up the backup
Go to the Roon menu using the menu button, in the menu go to Settings.
Go to submenu Backups and select the type of backup you want to make: a Scheduled backup or a Single backup. To check if all goes well, we recommend to make a Single backup first. To do this, press the Backup button.
You will get the following screen:

Press Select Location and select the HEAP disk:

And press Select This Folder and in the next screen, press Start.

Roon will start making a backup now, an empty database is done in a few seconds and a large catalog may take several hours. The Backup Settings menu will show “Last Successful Backup at hh:mm:ss” when it finished.

Verify and copy the backup
You can verify that the backup is made by checking if you see it in your Music folder via the network. You may then also copy, move or remove the backup. To see the Music folder you need to mount the Music disk in your network.
This is described in the MU1 software manual in more detail, please read this manual if you run into problems, you can find it under Downloads on the MU1 product page on our website.
To add the Music disk to the network, please perform the following steps:

1. Find the hostname of your MU1.
The hostname consist of a part of your MU1’s serial number. You can find it in the Roon Settings menu or in the MU1 menu on the display of the cabinet. In the Roon Settings menu it is stated at the top of the screen:

In this example the hostname is mu1-002133.
In the MU1 menu you can find it in the second settings menu in the bottom left corner:

2. Show the Music disk in your computer’s file browser.
This is different for Windows and Mac OS.
Windows: Open the explorer by pressing the Windows key + E.
Enter the hostname in the address bar preceeded by a double backslash: “\\mu1-002133” if your hostname is mu1-002133 and press enter. You will see the music disk and the roondata disk. The backup is in the music disk, in a folder called RoonBackups.
Mac OS: Open the Connect to Server Dialog by pressing the Apple key + K (⌘ + K). Enter the hostname preceeded by smb://: “smb://mu1-002133” if your hostname is mu1-002133.
In the next dialog press connect and select the music disk. Connect as Guest, there is no password required.
This will open the Music folder containing the backup folder (named RoonBackups) in the Finder.
You now have access to the disk and if you like you can copy the whole RoonBackups folder to another destination if you like. You can now also run a generic backup application on your computer that makes incremental backups of your music tracks, and also copies the RoonBackups folder.

Restoring a backup

To restore a backup you must have the backup on one of the 3 locations (Dropbox, NAS or Music disk).
Restoring from Dropbox is self explanatory and described in the Roon knowledge base. Restoring from a NAS or the Music disk is very similar.
Go to the Roon menu using the menu button, in the menu go to Settings.
Go to submenu Backups and select Browse behind the Find Backups title.
Browse to the HEAP folder in the left menu in case you used the internal Music disk. Then select the RoonBackups folder and press Select This Folder.
If you used a NAS, browse to the NAS that you used in the menu on the left. Select the RoonBackups folder and press Select This Folder.

You can choose the backup that you like to restore. Select the backup that you want and press Restore. You will have to confirm that you will lose the changes to the database that were made after making that backup. If you are sure, click Yes. You will have to relaunch Roon to continue.
After this step your backup was restored!

References

• help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/audio-analysis
• help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/backup
• help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/faq-what-s-the-best-way-to-configure-my-nas-for-roon
• MU1 - Grimm Audio

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