JB7 - dfficulty with Backup

[Ian Graham]

I have looked at the various Brennan documents, and tried searching on the forum, before making this post. There is no lack of instances, but I have found nothing that covers my exact case,

I have had a JB7 for around 11 years, and still keep adding stuff to it, though the CD-load function is long gone.

I have about 100Gb of recordings on it now, and am finally getting round to backing it up. I have, in fact, backed up part, within the capacity of a 32 Gb stick, but so far as I can see, the back-up needs to be done as a single operation ? (But this does demonstrate that the usb port can work.)

I have bought a new 125Gb stick, which came as exFAT, but I have reformated it to FAT32, with 32kb allocation units - but the Brennan still doesn't recognise it !

So am now at a bit of a loss. Would be very grateful for help.

Ian Graham, wales, UK

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Ian,

The JB7 'Backup music' function does need to be performed in a single operation.  For your 100GB collection, this will take about 68 hours or just under 3 days.

The USB stick might be a fake; Amazon and eBay are awash with these bad units.  Below is a link to a thread that explains the situation and how to test a USB stick. The test software does require a PC (not available for Mac).  The fact that you can do a partial backup to a smaller stick does indicate that the USB port on the JB7 is working correctly.

 I have just completed a backup of one of my JB7s to a USB HDD, which took about 84 hours (126GB) and it worked perfectly.

https://groups.google.com/g/brennanb2/c/1BakkcoHSQQ/m/sXqO8ZJkBgAJ

Regards,

Peter.

[Ian Graham]

Peter

Thank you for this quick reply. I have downloaded the check-ware and will run it. Can I ask, is there an upper size  limit to the device that can used ? A 'proper' external HD, for instance ? I can imagine there might be issues about (a) what the JB7 can relate to and (b) formatting a large drive as FAT32 ?

Sincerely

Ian G.

[Daniel Taylor]

I have used the h2testw program to test a larger HDD.  The largest capacity that the FAT32 will handle is 2TB.  So I'm confident that the h2testw program will handle up to that limit.

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Ian,

Up until now I hadn't used a USB 2TB HDD on the JB7, mainly because I have smaller HDDs to do this and my JB7 collection is only about 130GB.  However, this afternoon I have plugged a 2TB USB HDD into a JB7 and have started up a 'Backup music' on it.  This is now running nicely at its normal (slow) rate so it seems that the JB7 is happy to accommodate the 2TB drive.

As Daniel has stated, the maximum partition that FAT32 can handle is 2TB.  Windows 10 (and other versions of Windows) cannot format larger disks so I have downloaded IM-Magic Partition Resizer from the Web (free) and I use this for formatting my HDDs, SSDs and memory sticks.

Regards,

Peter.

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Ian,

My JB7 Backup to the 2TB USB HDD is now 16 hours in with 4000 tracks saved (out of 21000 tracks total), so the 84 hour duration looks good.

[Ian Graham]

Hallo, again

Thanks for the further replies. I wouldn't be using anything that requires 'Tb' totals, so that is good news. I have tested the stick I mentioned, and I think you're probably right about it being something smaller that's been mucked about with. That said, I'm still not clear why the JB7 would reject it out of hand, as opposed to starting a backup and stalling for lack of space ?

Sincerely

Ian G.

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Ian,

It's not that the USB stick is smaller than stated; the stick has been hacked and will keep re-using memory space that it has used a few seconds or minutes ago, overwriting data just written with more new data.  So the data on the stick is totally corrupted, even with a small data quantity.

I have one of these hacked sticks, and have tested it with small amounts of data; any and every small file was corrupt!  I would be inclined to not use that stick in the JB7 in case it corrupts your main music collection.  I only tested my bad stick on a PC.

I have used a mixture of USB HDDs, SD cards in a USB adapter and USB sticks in my two JB7s and these have all worked well for backups.

In the meantime, my JB7 backup is still running happily (after 46 hours) using a 2TB HDD USB drive and is now as track # 11080 of 20400, so it is getting there, albeit slowly!

Regards,

Peter

[Ian Graham]

1/3/22 Happy to record that my back-up is now complete, on a 125 Gb stick (another one). Thank you to every one for their help.

Ian G.