Backed up to card, now B2 is effed....?

[Jason Kinney]

So I dove in to exporting/backing up my 35592 FLAC tracks - 652.98Gb - to a 1Tb microsd card for my new phone (that can do up to 1Tb) and for a future portable digital player. I bought the SanDisk card and USB transfer adapter from the reputable online giant - the $150-ish priced card. As mentioned by others on this forum elsewhere, it would transfer for 3 or 4 hours and then give up. So I would do the *save*, turn off the Brennan, and take out the card from USB A and hook it up to my laptop to see how things were going. I did this several times over three days, and it seemed to be incrementally adding the tracks. Using USB A and following the 'export to C' / 'export to A' instructions on the Brennan website.

 

All seemed to be going well, but then the 652.98Gb on the B2 somehow is 785.25Gb on the card. ?

And now the kicker - my computer can't access the B2, and the phone app shows 30 artists and then, scrolling down from the artists, rows and rows of the album disc symbol - like the albums are there but untitled. ?

The B2 itself displays "29883 tracks, 2704 albums, 30 artists", down from my original "35592 tracks, 2704 albums, 912 artists".

I'm trying to stay calm and not use the F-word. Any thoughts on what's going on?

Original status screen cap before I started the back-up:

My current phone app showing 30 artists and then rows and rows of discs:

Screen cap of the computer showing limited artists and it's unresponsiveness:

 

[Jeff. M.]

That doesn't look like B2 Web address, it should be 192.168.1.xxx

[Jeff. M.]

Your phone will take awhile to populate, mine did, only a 256gb card! 

[Jason Kinney]

May be a regional thing.

I'm west coast US...

B2 bought in 2020 from Brennan website.

When power goes out the address changes, but usually just the last number.

[Jason Kinney]

Thanks! I was prepared for that, researching and reading a little about all of this over the years - and it indeed is taking a bit as I am doing that right now. Made sure I got a phone with 6Gb ram - my old one was 2Gb ram, haha.

[Jeff. M.]

If you get the Web UI back you'll be good to go, no? I think back ups are always bigger than the B2 says, album art etc. Maybe get your router to assign a fixed ip address to B2, loads on the forum to help if you use search! 

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Jason,

The first problem is that your software version is very old and happens to contain a bug that causes the Export (and also the Import) to crash after about 4 hours of running.  The bug was fixed in July 2020 so that the Export now runs from start to finish if the USB device is a good one.

I was involved in tracking that problem down at the time, and since the fix I've done many Exports and Imports.  My collection takes about 9 hours to Export and since then it has 'Export'ed faultlessly.

So I would run 'Settings' -->  'Web Upgrade' .  This will get your software up to date.

Then run 'Settings' --> 'Scan Disk'.

After that, if you post here the stats for the number of tracks, disk space used, the new version number, etc. and we can offer more help.  If you cannot acess the stats from the WebUI, then on the B2 remote control press the 'Info' button for the stats, followed by 'Info' again to get the version number.

This needs to be done in careful stages, so that we can establish an accurate baseline for you music collection.

Regards,

Peter.

[Peter Lowham]

Hi All,

I received the note below from Jason in my PM so I have reposted that here.  There are a couple of embedded images which have not come across in the copy.

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Thanks, Peter!

Okay... software updated and disc scan done.

Test-played a few tracks via the webUI that is now working again.

It looks like everything is back! Well, almost everything - in the before times I had listed 35592 tracks and 2704 albums, as well as 652.98Gb...  now listed are 35578 tracks and 2709 albums with 763.80Gb. (See screen caps.)

Hmmmm. A small enough discrepancy such that I am not going to worry about it as I'd thought I"d lost almost everything! Two years of uploading music during a pandemic!

 

Should I hold down the PLAY/STOP button to save, as one does?

 

A side note that may or may not apply - so far the Sandisk Extreme card is working great on my new phone, after taking awhile to 'load'. There are about 30 albums that were thrown into an UNKNOWN ARTISTS folder after having the artists and track names removed somehow. I'm pretty thorough with doing the save function when uploading/updating info on the B2, but either it was just the buggy back-up, or I did indeed forget to press PLAY/STOP to save. The album cover art is with them so I am able to identify what's what. Hmmm. Again, I'll just go into the card via my laptop and update those folders. 

Everything appears OKAY, but I will await any possible next steps from you before I put this baby in use again . . .

Best,

Jason Kinney

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Hi Jason,

 The situation here is looking a lot better now.  The discrepancy in the number of tracks looks to be 14 'WAV'  tracks, and that means that these are probably the last one or two albums that you ripped.

Yes, you should press and hold the 'Play/Stop' button until you see 'Saving' .  That will ensure that that the B2's internal database is saved to the HDD.

Now that you have updated the software you should be able to run the 'Export' through to completion without further problems.

So the 'Export' is the next step to complete.  Also, the fact that you have posted screenshots of the 'Settings & Status' window that indicates that you have been able to connect to the B2 via the WebUI, so that is another problem that is resolved.

Also, for now, don't worry about the differences between the data volume reports; there are a couple of reasons for this which we can look at later.

Regards,

Peter.

[Jason Kinney]

Thank you very much for your time, Peter.

And sorry for the direct reply instead of a reply-all - at 49, this is my first time using a forum - *gasp*.

From the amount of files loaded and Gb's on my microsd card, it appears I've got everything or almost everything.

Those weird files aforementioned in my last note that got thrown into an 'unknown artist' file on my phone show up fine when I look at the card via a card-reader on my laptop. It must be something with my phone or the Phonograph App that I use that is handling those albums that way.

This situation will definitely have me backing up as well to another storage USB drive sooner than later, besides what I just did. And glad to know it will go more smoothly now that my software is updated! (I thought I was keeping track of that stuff but somehow I did indeed miss doing the upgrade back in 2020.) 

Best regards,

Jason

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Jason,

Glad to know that you are back on 'safe ground'!  Brennan releases software upgrades on a regular basis (often every couple of months), so it is worth doing a regular check for newer releases.  And yes, I would encourage you to run another 'Export' on a separate USB device; two copies are much safer than one!

A point to note is that there are two methods that music devices use to building their database (catalogue) of music.

1.  Using the artist name, album name and track name (this is what the B2 uses).

2.  Using the tag data stored within each track file (this is what Sonos uses for example).

The problem with item 2 is that the tag data must be present for this method to work correctly, and sometimes this is not the case.  This might be the cause of your 'Unknown'  artists and albums.  You can download something like 'mp3Tag' which will make tag updating and editing much easier.

Regards,

Peter.