backup issues/ lost tracks on main hdd

[Paul Tremblay]

So I decided to get an external drive of 1TB to perform a complete backup of the b2. I had spent almost all of last week ripping as wav files 99% of my cd inventory. I had 9901 tracks, don't remember how many albums or artist. started the 'export to a' after formating the new drive on the b2. Damn it's slow, took over 12 hours. I removed the backup drive after powering off. upon powering back up I noticed the b2 showed 8442 tracks, ok run scan disk. now it shows 8243 tracks????  Where did they go????? I just lost 1700 tracks somewhere from the b2 drive. Any ideas? I don't even know what tracks/albums/artist it could be. Short of going folder by folder and comparing the b2 to the backup is there any way of verify who is correct and if I actually lost stuff. Also does the 'tracks' listing either the scrolling display or the web ui include the associated files, ie the cover art/toc/discid.

Does anyone know of a free file comparison tool that can be used on 2 files to see what is different between them? I really don't want to have to go through and reload all the discs again as it was literally around 40 hours of labor time.

[PMB]

Hi ptrem,

Peter Lowham's advice is to run Scan Disc before a backup to make sure the b2db is up to date. Are you 100% of the original Track count?

Please post the Stats - Artists, Albums, Track, etc?

The Track count on the B2 does not include Album Artwork, TOC and ID files (these last two are sometimes included with a rip) but these will be backed up and included if you check the backup device (Properties) on your computer.

I've read some posts on this Forum about comparison programs but unable to locate them this morning. 

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Daniel Taylor]

I wonder if your B2 had finished compressing the WAV files before you started your backup.  Every time it goes into standby, it will start compressing the files again.  That will cause the count of WAV files to go down, and the count of either FLAC or MP3 files to go up.  You probably want all your files compressed before you start the backup - it will take less time and less space on the disk.

[JFBUK]

Hi,

Have the album and artist counts changed as well ?

I'd be very surprised if the tracks are lost.

You can download the B2DB file ( this is the B2 music index file) onto a USB drive and then take a look at it on your computer. This should be accurate as you have run a successful scan disk and everything is working as it should be functionally ?

>SETTING>MAINTENANCE> b2db to USB C

The best thing would be to open the B2DB file in spreadsheet software like Excel so you can search and manipulate it

There is Windows freeware that can compare folders (not sure about Apple) but what are you going to compare ?

John

[Paul Tremblay]

Hello all, Thank you for the current replys.

Yes I'm 100% sure of the original track count as I looked at it before starting the export so I could keep track of the time and how many tracks had been transfered. I had also done a disc scan after I finished the last cd rip before placing the b2 into the audio case before purchasing the b/u drive.

I have run scan disc several times since seeing the track count change and it has stalled at 8239. 

As it now stands the stats are 8239 tracks, 804 albums, 289 artist.

I don't compress. All my files are raw rip as wav. I figured once I got to 3/4 full on a 2 TB drive than I would compress. Before connecting the b/u drive the unit was on but in stand by,, I pressed the 'x' button on the remote 2 times to cause the unit to come out of stand by than go back in before powering off to connect new drive to usb port.

I can't say I recall the album/artist count but I want to say the album count lost at least 50 as I think it was around 859 albums but not 100% sure on that one. I haven't actually 'used' the unit since doing the backup but don't see why things wouldn't work. The reason I was asking for suggestions on the comparison software is I was going to remove the drive from the b2 and place in my computer along with the backup and do a disc/disc compare to see what is different file name wise. I know there is going to be some info on the internal that won't be on the b/u.

[Paul Tremblay]

I just pulled the b2db to usb as was requested earlier. I will look at it this weekend, but I noticed it buggered quite a few of the settings. IE clock time zone was wrong, brightness went back to full, turned on spotify and turned off dlna and changed compression to flac from none. Is that suposed to happen? I thought it would just copy the db to the usb flash drive, not go back to new.

[Paul Tremblay]

Where do I go to turn off spotify, I don't see it in the menu structure? I don't use it and it was off before and I would like it off again even though it most likely won't make any difference.

[Paul Tremblay]

Never mind, found it after searching the b2 site on how to enable it.

[PMB]

Hi ptrem...,

So you are saying that using 'b2db to USB C' change some of the B2's settings. What software version is the B2 running - press INFO on the remote twice or click the COG wheel on the web UI?

I'm away from my desk today but will check this on Monday.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Paul Tremblay]

Yes I am Paul, I was surprised when I found things changed after doing the db export. I'm at B2b OCT 22, 2021. The unit is just sitting in my stereo cab and hasn't been used since doing the backup till I did the db export. 

[Daniel Taylor]

That's what I would call bizarre behavior, which makes me think that reflashing the SD card may be in order.

[Paul Tremblay]

Ok time for an update on this saga. I originally started doing a comparison manually between b2 and b/u viewing the actual size and files/folders of each artist but found to time consuming. I than saved a copy of the b/u to my local hard drive and was going through each artist/album and deleting the art, toc and discid to get down to an actual number of files that should match the 'number of tracks' but also found it to be slow and tedious and most likely not going to net me what I'm looking for. I decided to look at the b2db file I downloaded as requested. As I started to scroll down the list looking at what it said I found my first bit of evidence listed as '0TRACKS' under an album. I punched that '0TRACKS' into the search engine and kept clicking next, 126 times!!!!! 126 albums that have had the music deleted from their respective folders. If we were to assume an average of 10 to 12 tracks per album that works out to 1260 to 1512 tracks. Go high and take that 1512 and add that to my current scan disc total of 8243 gives 9755 tracks, just under my original 100% sure 9900 original tracks at the start of backing up. The only other thing this list won't tell me is how many albums/artist are missing that I only have 1 album for, and that could account for the other missing 200 tracks. as that would only be 10 or so artist but which ones?? so I still have to go through every cd by hand......   :>(

I have no words for just how peeved I am at these findings. I'm not placing blame here, bashing the product or otherwise. When it comes to computers, sometimes shit happens and that's why one should have a backup, but backing up is not supposed to be what makes shit happen. In the short amount of time I actually listened to music from it, it did work flawlessly. I'm half tempted to do a full wipe back to like I got it new and start from scratch but I don't relish the thought of that as I spent in excess of 40 hours of my vacation loading all my music and now that I'm back at work I only have 1 hour per day to reload my music which would take over a month to do.

I still don't understand why the database export screwed up all my settings though.

[Paul Tremblay]

just to say before I'm asked, I did look at the affected albums on the backup and the b2 drive over nas, all albums that showed 0tracks on the database really do not have any music files in them, just an empty folder.

I decided to not delete all and start over but I am going through every cd and verifying every album has the correct track listing word for word. still not fun either way but slightly quicker. I have found 2 albums so far that were missing 1 song each along with reloading several albums so far that have no tracks.

[Daniel Taylor]

Do I understand that the songs that are missing on the backup are also missing on the B2 itself?  If that's true, then it could be that the Export worked okay, and that maybe the corruption happened at some earlier time.  Without going back and reading every post in this thread, I'll mention again that the B2 does not handle multi-tasking well, and asking it to do more than one thing at a time can sometimes end in disaster.  For example, I learned the hard way to not play music on the B2 at the same time I was working on my playlists.  Reminds me of my old Windows 98 laptop, which could barely do one thing at a time.

[PMB]

Hi ptrem...,

How about Daniel's question on whether the missing backup tracks are also missing on the B2?

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Paul Tremblay]

That's correct Daniel, no tracks on b2 or backup coinciding with the b2db showing no tracks. I supposed it's possible it happened prior to me performing the backup I'm not going to say it didn't/couldn't have, it is a computer after all and things happen but I have no way to verify pre backup. I can only say that I had 9900 tracks after my last cd rip before I put the unit in the case and it had 9900 tracks after I powered it back on after connecting the external drive, once done doing the backup I saw the track count reduced to 8400 than after multiple scan disc runs it stabalized at 8200 tracks.  My first post does outline what happened and it's a short read. I also had been doing lots of reading before I got my unit and came to the same conclusion, so when I was ripping, that's all I was doing. During the backup process I just let it be to do it's thing.

[Daniel Taylor]

I wonder:  when things start to go wrong, for whatever reason, if the B2 doesn't really know about it until a Scan Disk is done.  I'm just trying to figure out if maybe there had been problems happening for awhile, and it was only after the Scans had been done that it started to become apparent.

At this point, it seems like all you can do is rip the missing albums again.  The Export is incremental, so the newly re-ripped music will be added to the backup on successive times.  I agree that it's a big time suck to figure out what all is missing.

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Paul T,

On reading through this thread, it looks to me that the problem with the missing tracks probably originates at the time of ripping.  I read that you ripped 9900 tracks in a 7 day period.  That is about 900 CDs, so the ripping is running at about 120 CDs per day.

In normal use, we recommend that CDs are ripped in batches or 30 and then let the B2 complete its tasks on each batch before ripping the next batch.  This is because the B2 can get into difficulty if a large backlog of tracks builds up if the B2 is being constantly fed CDs without a break.

A small number of forum users have experienced some corruption problems when running the ripping on the B2 in 'flat out' mode.  In some of these situations,  the HDD had to be reformatted after dropping into 'Read only mode' during normal play mode.

I suspect that this might be the cause of the problem here. 

So at the time of ripping, the 'b2db' file would contain records of 9901 tracks, but because the ripping process has been placed under a good deal of pressure,  some of the tracks were not actually being written to disk.  This would cause some of the tracks to be missing.  This situation could also cause the '0 tracks' situation.

Then when you ran 'Scan Disk', the B2 rebuilt 'b2db' from what was really on the HDD, and this resulted in only 8442 tracks being found.

Moving further into the issues, I think that the 'Export' has probably worked correctly, and has exported what was was on the B2's HDD.  I have done upwards of 200 Exports over the past 2 years and have found the process to be very solid.  Also, the Export works by starting at the first ripped album and working its way through the 'music' directory in the order that the CDs were ripped, until the last album is backed up.  The Export process does not use the 'b2db' file.

With regard to the changed B2 Settings file, I think that the Settings file got corrupted in memory when the B2 got into trouble during the ripping.  This file is written back to the HDD during the closedown process and that could be where the changes occurred to the settings.

I cannot think at the moment of any easy way of working out exactly what is missing.  The 126 events of '0 tracks' is a good start, as these albums are totally missing.  That would recover say  about 1400 tracks.  But finding individual tracks will require  a manual check, I think, as there is no complete reference list to work from.  The 'b2db' file contains, for each album, a count of the number of tracks in the album.  You could compare this count with each CD cover.

Regards,

Peter.

[Paul Tremblay]

Ya, it is a suck situation Daniel, but it is what it is. I'm almost half way through my catalog of discs.

Peter, I didn't consider the high cd rip as going to be an issue as I'm not compressing . I would think it should be just a matter of ripping and labeling as there is not muck effort in that part of the operation. It's the file change to flac or mp3 or what ever file reduction is being done that eats up cpu power. I did do a scan disc every once in a while when ripping and the number of tracks never changed along with doing a final scan disc at the end before placing the b2 in the stereo rack. I am currently going disc by disc and comparing to the b2 list through the web ui of albums and tracks. I have found several albums that have gotten scrambled with songs from other albums along with a few missing tracks from 1 album here and there plus the fully missing album tracks. I went in and looked at the date stamps of the folders affected to try to get an idea of when it could have happened but the albums are scattered all over the hard drive and with different days when they were ripped so I still have no clue as to what occured. I have been anal about pressing the play/stop button and placing the unit into standby before powering off each time to prevent these issues but it just goes to show that even doing what should be done doesn't always prevent issues.

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Paul T,

Yes, I understand what you are saying and would agree to some extent because you are only ripping and not compressing..  However, the B2 still has to perform a process to convert the CD tracks content into 'WAV' format before writing the content to the HDD. 

If problems persist, I would think about re-flashing the O/S onto the SD card, or getting a new SD card from Brennan if you B2 is under warranty.

On the subject of examining the ripped tracks, I have set up NAS between the B2 and a PC.  I can then list the album directories and sort the folders and tracks by date/time which can sometimes give a clue as to what has happened.

Regards,

Peter.

[Paul Tremblay]

I had thought of doing it that way Peter, but because this uses 801.11n it is painfully slow to transfer the files over NAS into the b2 when I find an empty folder, just as easy to do it directly on the b2

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Paul T,

Yes, the wireless connection is painfully slow as you say, so I use a Cat5 wired connection for NAS.  The USB transfer is the most efficient method but the wired Cat5 connection is pretty good and is also very convenient..

Regards,

Peter.

[Paul Tremblay]

I've been looking at the date stamps of the albums that are missing as I'm reripping for missing and there is no rhyme or reason. I've found a few artists that have several albums where it is just 1 song missing or it could have 4 albums that were ripped on different days and all the tracks are missing from all 4 albums or maybe 1 album is intact, 1 is missing 1 track and the others are missing all tracks. I even have 1 folder of 'various artist' where part of them were labeled just 'various' but was renamed to consolidate, that has at least 25 albums and all tracks are missing from it. I could chalk it up to over ripping if it was linked to a specific date and time frame but it's not. I suspect it was just a shit happens thing

Either way. I've gained back 863 tracks bringing me to 9106 and I still have another 1/3 of my catalog to go.

[PMB]

Hi ptrem...,

I assume you are checking the Albums as you re-rip them now, just in case.....

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Paul Tremblay]

Oh yes. Once ripped I go back over and verify tracks are actually there. On a side note I have regained all my tracks that were missing. 9902 total. I only found 1 missing album but ran into 2 albums that the drive would not rerip but had ripped previously. 

I'm just going to chalk this whole situation up to 'stuff happens" and hope it never happens again. Thanks all for the time and suggestions relating to this issue.

[David Richards]

For the two CDs that wont rip, you could try ripping on your PC using Exact Audio Copy or dbpoweramp and then copy across using NAS or a USB stick. Some people use these for all their ripping.

DR

[Paul Tremblay]

I think I stumbled on why things went pear shaped.  I purchased a 2tb drive to put into my b2 when I bought it. I did lots or research before hand. I got a standard platter drive instead of a ssd because it's just music and having fast read/write is not really required, I settled on a WD blue drive as it was listed as being good for sequential reads like music or video. I got it from Newegg.  Today I stumbled upon a post from Linus Teck Talk about WD having a law suit against them for undocumented SMD on large capacity thin drives. I'm not going to get into detail on the difference between smd and cmd drives as it is all on the web if your interested in techy talk but suffice it to say the drive doesn't just write data to the platter in one shot when there is already data on it. Not knowing the drive was smd, when I finished ripping I went through the b2 per power off procedure to shut it off the unit, however all the 'pending to write data' was dumped. 

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

WOW! Well researched - this is a very subtle, arcane issue!

Fred