I’m finally, rather belatedly, getting round to backing up my Uniti Core. I have purchased an external hard drive initially (no discussions about NAS please at this stage!) and my question is regarding the formatting of this new drive. I don’t know much about formatting but I see my Core has NTFS as the format. I only use Apple devices for computing at home and I have been advised that exFAT will be a good format for the new back up drive, being compatible with both iOS and Windows devices (should that ever be required).
Are people more knowledgeable in this subject in agreement with this or do you have other recommendations?
Anyway you can choose the format at the point you first tell the Core to backup to that drive. exFAT is listed as intended for Linux but it should work fine with Windows and Mac but I have never tried it. Equally I have never seen a report here that it doesn’t work.
I suggest do a backup with exFAT and then try to check it’s readable on a Windows PC and a Mac.
@davidhendon I re-formatted the external hard drive to exFAT but once I plugged it into the Core for first backup it said the disc must be formatted and then gave only 2 options, NTFS for Windows or HFS+ for Mac, so I will go for the latter.
I looked again at the online instructions and I see that it says that ExFAT will be delivered by a forthcoming update. I didn’t notice that on the online wizard.
Anyway I’m sure it will be fine now.
Best
So yesterday I backed up the Core to my external hard drive, no issues at all. I ripped a pile of CD’s today and then went to back up again - no success.
Would it matter that all previous rips that I backed up yesterday were WAV and the rips today were FLAC? In regards to my backup issues in the previous post.
Hi David, tried that after discussions with Naim Support. Still no success. I have sent a screenshot to them of the backup status page in the App showing the error and hopefully they will get back to me tomorrow.
All you are getting into is a very simple piece of kit that does what it says on the tin. I understand the software/metadata collection is not wonderful for lovers of Classical Music, but I’m not. I also understand that that there are cheaper alternatives (a decent NAS etc) that will probably sound equally as good. But tbh, I just want to rip and listen to music very easily with as little hassle as possible. Backing up, I just bought a good quality Samsung SSD which I hook up once a week and back up. I rip everything to FLAC .
I had my Core out the box, Hard Drive (which had been installed by dealer), formatted and first CD’s ripped in 15 minutes.
If Naim support don’t have any other suggestions then I would suggest formatting the drive in the Core again but as NTFS this time and then start the backup all over again.
Best
Sorry I was distracted when I wrote that. What I meant to say was format the backup drive again and make it NTFS this time. You certainly don’t need to reformat the Core drive. Many apologies.
Best
Thanks David, I’m still waiting on a reply from Naim Support with any more ideas they have. If it still doesn’t work after that then I can try your suggestion, although that will render the external hard drive incompatible with my MacBook Pro. The initial backup went extremely smoothly with around 600 albums so I had high hopes that future “update” backups would be a simple straightforward affair - that’s where I went wrong!
It should be straightforward and it certainly works ok for me with a usb HDD formatted with NTFS. Anyway it will be interesting to see what they say ultimately.
There has been much contact between myself and Naim Support and we have at last got to the root of the problem. After much re-setting and re-formatting and re-booting and checking out the external hard drive as well without any success, via a lead software director at Naim my Core was remote accessed by a consultant developer. He was able to diagnose a fault within the Core internal hard drive, basically a small part of the disc which had gone faulty and the albums I had ripped to that part of the disc could not be copied.
Thankfully he was able to back up the sizeable collection of CD’s already ripped to the Core with only 9 un-recoverable, a list of these was also provided. I have now ordered a new internal HDD and can load it up from the external hard drive. Not a bad result in the end, it could have been a lot worse if I had not managed to back up at all! I will definitely keep on top of the backups in future.
One thing that concerns me though - was I just unlucky with a HDD which is only a couple of years old? What would I have done without the intervention of a specialist? I would never have known the internal HDD was faulty without that so not sure what other steps I could have taken myself.
