All good. Palmy isn’t too far away if you need it. I still need to get up there at some point to check out the Arapuke mountain bike park.
Hi all,
Quick update and a quick question.
So it appears the hard disc was not in a very healthy condition. I couldn’t even view it when plugged into a USB caddy. I’ve given it to the very talented dude (I have also given the URL to this forum!) in our electronics workshop and he says it had 120 dead sectors, which sounds bad. Luckily, he thinks given enough time, and possible cake-based bribery, that he might be able to rescue some of the data. Which will be good. Anyways, bought a new hard disc and will install at the weekend.
My question involves my attempts to restore my library. First, I’m a little worried about the back-up - when I view this through my Mac I can look at the MQ folder. It has folders for all the bands/artists. But those from A through F are just empty folders, no folder for the albums. There is a ‘recycle’ folder that contains folder for these artists and these folders contain the album folders inside. Is this normal? If I try to restore from this back-up am I just asking for trouble?
Presumably, if I can’t use the ‘restore from back-up’ then I just use the downloads folder (as David indicated messing with the MQ folder is bad).
Sorry to bother you all again (and thanks for all the help)
Gareth
Hi Gareth
No it’s not normal. All the folders containing ripped music should be in the MQ and not the recycle bin! It doesn’t matter whether they are in artist’s folders as long as each album is in a separate folder. They are usually nested by artist or composer for convenience.
If it were me I would put the contents back where I thought they should be and then try restoring that backup. It will take a while as I said before. So give it as long as it wants.
I suspect the reasons the contents are in recycling is because the last or a recent backup realised the folders were empty on the disc being backed up (because of the bad sectors) and so moved the contents to the waste bin.
Good luck anyway!
Best
David
I would have thought that trying to restore the MQ folder now that it’s been messed up would be likely to fail. Safer to just manually put everything into the downloads folder, or perhaps I’m just a coward!
Yes, well let’s just say over-cautious Chris! If it fails then he can just do it again your way. But it won’t fail.
Best
David
Hi Garth. One thing that I’ve found is that whilst the recommendation is that you don’t copy or move content into the MQ folder, it’s possible to do so, and will index correctly so long as you re-build the database itself afterwards.
I run all of my music off a NAS - I’ve got two volumes - one for the music ripped by the Core (which runs as a Core music Store), and another for the FLAC files I’ve downloaded (which I run as a Core music Share).
I’ve both moved between NAS’es and had disk failures in the NAS that have required me to restore both the share and store, and in all cases telling the Core to rebuild the music databaseb (in “other settings” in the configuration menu in your Naim app) has brought everything right. All you’ll need to do is mount the Core drive onto your computer, and copy to the drive from your backups.
For me the big question would be how the music ended up in the recycle folder - to me that suggests that something told the Core to delete the music from A-F.
As I said above, I think what happened here is the Core disc crash meant the content location was lost on the internal hard disc and because the OP attempted a backup (which would have been differential as he says he had previously backup some time ago), as he described in his opening post, the files that were already backed up on the backup copy were moved to recycling on the backup because they were no longer needed.
So not a mystery, just things working as they should!
Best
David
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Ah yep, that’ll be it. I missed the bit about the recycle folder being on the backup 
David,
Thanks for the tips; will be trying this over the weekend.
Jono,
Thanks for that. I suspect it was the problem with the hard drive being replicated to the back-up, in the sense that the Core couldn’t read those files on the hard drive so decided they shouldn’t be on the back-up either. If that makes sense? My colleague from the workshop recovered about 1/2 the damaged drive but noticeably it is only the latter half of the alphabet. I guessing the hard drive has something against A-L (and that I stopped the back-up at 900% so before it had a chance to recycle F-L). But I have no evidence so I could be just making that up to fit my findings …
But thanks for the advice, it looks like I should be able to slowly rebuild things. Luckily (?) I ran out of shelf space so all the newer cds are easier to find, they’re the ones in an untidy pile on the floor, and I keep a separate back-up of all downloaded music so it’s now just a case of finding how far I have to go back and then loading everything back on.
Gareth
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And I think I’ve learnt some lessons:
- when you have that nagging feeling that a back-up is overdue … act on it
- amusingly enough, the warranty on the hdd ran out two months ago … perhaps that should have told me something!
Thanks all, it’s nice to know there is a really helpful community out there.
Gareth
Yep, because I’m paranoid (and more importantly I don’t want to go through ripping 2500 cds and re-downloading the 600 albums I’ve bought digitally), I back up my NAS to my secondary NAS every day, and put a reminder in my calendar to back up the music folders from the NAS to a USB disk (and store it somewhere else) every 3 months.
Good to hear that you’re on the path to getting everything back on track.
Out of interest what hdd was you using?
Gazza,
I confess I can’t remember exactly (as I have left it with my colleague), but it was a WD Red something or other … not sure it was the best choice (even before these problems) but there must have been some reason I got it.
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That sounds likely, interesting as Naim recommended a Seagate drive that is used continuously for video camera surveillance. May be other type of drives are less robust in this anpplicstion?
possibly … the replacement is a Seagate so hopefully I’ve got it right this time 
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The thing is that if the Core is in network sleep or fully powered up, the hard disc spins 24/7. A NAS drive should be able to cope with that but a video surveillance drive will likely just be that bit more resilient.
Best
David
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Hi all.
Good news. It is all up and running (touch wood and all that).
I took David’s advice and moved the files from the recycle folder and returned them to the MQ folder on the backup. Then spent the weekend restoring the backup (turns out >60,000 files takes some time to restore).
I now have everything up to the 5th January 2021 back (so like Jono mentioned, it is a relieve not to have to rip >2000 CDs again). 6 months is much more manageable (and it appears that I have bought more vinyl this years and I store the original ‘vinyl rips’ elsewhere). In a week or twos time I should be fully back! And yes, I will be doing a back-up the instant that last file is back on the Core!
Thank you all for the tips/help/support. Much appreciated (and yes I will be lurking around this forum learning about NAS and trying to find a better to keep myself backed-up).
Cheers
Gareth
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Hi Gareth
Excellent news. I’m so happy for you and thank you for letting us know how it came out. Not everyone bothers.
If you need any help with the NAS choice or setup there are several people here who can advise.
Best
David
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