Problems with My External HDD and Backing Up My MacBook Pro

[mwheelerk]

I have a late year 2014 MacBook Pro. Along with that I have (3) Lacie Quadra 3TB Thunderbolt external desktop drives along with (1) Western Digital Portable USB 2TB drive. The drives are two years old. My MacBook operates on the latest Mac OS. For managing my music library I use the following softwares. iTunes, JRiver Media Center For Mac, Sonos and Tidal. I also have iTunes, XLD, dbPoweramp and JRiver for ripping, converting and tagging my files. I'm on the latest version of each software. All of my files had been AIFF files until I made a recent change and batch converted my files to Apple Lossless (mp4).

The reason I opted to convert the files is because all of my listening is now done via a Sonos System using Wifi and I felt I had some buffering issues while playing back the AIFF files that I believed would be eliminated by the lossless compressed ALAC (mp4) files.

My process for conversion of the AIFF to ALAC was to use JRiver's tool for conversion that allowed for batch conversion. I started by converting a single album at a time for a couple of albums. Once I confirmed the album was in the proper folder and that it would play I began trying a larger quantity a couple of times and finally started converting larger sets of files, up to 2,000 at a time, by alphabet.

I would convert in JRiver which would immediately place the ALAC files in place and delete the AIFF files from JRiver but not the Music Folder. I would then go back into the Music Folder location confirm the presence of the ALAC files, go into iTunes delete the AIFF files which removed them from the Music Folder and then iTunes Add To Library the ALAC files. This was just a little checks and balance I was doing that I was comfortable with.

I've run into two problems. 

First the music from iTunes using the ALAC files in the Music Folder plays fine on my MacBook and appear to be fine. I can play these same files from JRiver to my Sonos system by using the Sonos as a Media Renderer and it reads the files and plays them fine. But while the files from iTunes and JRiver seem to be fine, and the buffering issue has seemed to be resolved I now cannot add these files to my Sonos Music Library. I've reached out to Sonos for help but without response yet but no matter what I try the Add Music Folder function in Sonos will no longer recognize my MacBook or my Music Library Lacie HDD.

Secondly and even more confusing is I am now unable to back up my Music Library to any of the drives that I used. One of the Lacie is identified as the Music Library and it is attached directly to the MacBook via Thunderbolt and that is where the music files reside. A second Lacie is identified as Primary Back Up and this is where I have used Time Machine to back up the MacBook and Music Library HDD. The third Lacie HDD is used is used to back up only the Music Library drive using Carbon Copy Clone and is identified as CCC Primary Back Up. Finally I have a USB Western Digital 2TB portable drive that I use as the CCC Secondary Back Up and keep in a firesafe.

With this set up I am not able to back up using any of these drives. Whether I use Time Machine from MacBook/Music Library or use CCC from Music Library to CCC Primary Back Up or Music Library to CCC Secondary Back Up each and every time regardless of whether I am using Time Machine or CCC I will launch the back up and it will appear to be running normally. I have watched it run up to about 85GB and then my MacBook will simply crash. No sound, it just suddenly goes to black and shuts off. The only common thread in this that I see is the Lacie Music Library Drive but this seems to be working for playback for iTunes and JRiver but as I said a back up including this will not complete either with Time Machine or CCC.

Last Friday I took my MacBook and the three Lacie Drives to the Apple Store Genius Bar. After describing all this they chose to keep my MacBook for test and also kept the one Lacie drive Primary Back Up that is used with Time Machine. After testing the machine over the weekend I got the MacBook back on Monday. They said everything on the MacBook checked out okay. They reset "eprom" I think is what they said. They did new back up using Time Machine on that drive but of course that didn't include my music files which are on the Music Library Lacie drive.

I brought everything home immediately hooked it up and nothing, the same issues. I'm left thinking something is wrong with the Music Library Lacie drive yet it works with iTunes and JRiver but not with Sonos which doesn't recognize it and not with backups.

I have run Desktop Utility and First Aid on all hard drives including the MacBook and all check out okay. I reinstalled a Lacie Desktop tool but it does not recognize any of the Lacie Drives.

I thought to simply to a restore from the last Time Machine back up in mid-September which would bring me back to the original AIFF file structure but a certain dummy, finger pointing in my direction, decided he would erase contents of the Time Machine Primary Back Up so he would have plenty of room for the new ALAC fils so now I cannot due a Time Machine restore and though I have the music files on two CCC drives I'm uncertain how to recover them.

If anyone that is way smarter than me can provide some suggestion on what to do so that Sonos will recognize the Music Library HDD and that both Time Machine and CCC will back up this Music Library HDD I will be forever in your debt. I've been so careful in managing my music library for over ten years and this is the first and only real mess up I've had.

Thank you for reading all this. I hope it made sense. Thank you for any potential help.

 

Last edited: 1 minute ago

 

[wwaldmanfan]

Sorry, I know nothing about Sonos. I don't trust automated backup software like CCC or Time Machine. I've attempted to use SuperDuper! and found it unreliable.

Have you tried backing up by simply dragging and dropping the files between libraries from the FInder? I've had Macs for decades, and I always do it that way. I periodically duplicate my entire 2TB library overnight without losing a single byte of data. Since the computer does the heavy lifting, it is simpler to just backup up the entire thing from scratch than try to constantly do confusing updates.

I would advise to never delete the original master, especially if it is in a lossless, uncompressed format. Doing that to save HD space, which is so cheap, seems foolish. There's bound to be some obscure stuff in there that you'll never be able to replace.

[bobfa]

Did you find out what your problems were?  I support a lot of Macs and systems and there is so much here it is hard to determine what the problem is.  I assume that you are on macOS High Sierra.  There have been a few patches to the OS so make sure you are up to date.  Also there have been updates to Carbon Copy Cloner to work better with High Sierra....

 

The add music library problem may be related to security and file sharing settings on your Mac..  

 

Backups and file sharing to SONOS seem to be the problems you are trying to address.  

 

Let us know if you are still having problems that we can help with.  

 

Bob

[mwheelerk]

All things have been resolved.  The back up issue I got lucky and discovered about 5 Buddy Guys albums that someone became corrupted in the conversion processing.  Once I removed them from the folder structure of my music library both back up from Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner were successful.