I’m having to rebuild my Engine OS library from my SD card after a problem updating my Mac OS. I was running Catalina and now running Big Sur. I always updated my Engine OS and Prime GO firmware except for the last one before my problems. What I’m wondering is should I be able to seamlessly update my GO firmware to match my Engine OS even though I’ve changed Mac OS’s? Just want to make sure I’m not inviting any issues I didn’t have before. Oh and should I be able to just bring all my music from my SD card back to Engine complete with the playlists I had? Best way for a large transfer? Last question. What’s the quickest way to copy a large library of mp3’s from my SD card to an external hard drive? I don’t want it to stop in the middle of the process and lose anything. That’s why I want to back up all the music. Thank you to anyone that responds.
Cant speak on the hardware upgrade but you should be able to use Sync manager to sync your SD card back onto your computer. not sure what it will do about file placement though.
Carbon Copy Cloner is what i use
Depends on how your created the SD card in the first place. Is it a “packed” SD card?
Try the update when you have downtime and test extensively at home before declaring it prime time.
Are you referring to the library on the player or on your mac?
- Engine OS library = player
- Engine DJ library = computer
you should consider having your main library on an external SSD going forward so you can navigate situations like this in the future…you may want to buy a new computer down the line and you would be dealing with this again.
I thought that’s what I would use but until I had this issue I wasn’t sure since I didn’t pay much attention to previous posts, if there were any, on this topic. Thanks!
Ideally you never want to be in a situation where you only have one copy of your music library left, It’s Sod’s Law that that single point of failure will fail just like your iMac did. The first thing I would do in your situation is copy all files from your SD card on to you iMac (assuming you have enough space) this will be the quickest assuming you have an SSD in your iMac. From there I would make another copy on to your external hard drive. (Multiple copies if you have the disks) Only then when you have redundancy would I look at rebuilding the Engine OS library by syncing back from the SD card. I don’t personally know enough about how the sync manager works with regard to syncing back to Engine OS so wouldn’t like to advise on that (I’m sure someone here will have done this before) All I know is without a backup, if you were to sync the wrong way you could kiss your music library good bye! 
My Music sits on my MacBook in a sync’d Synology Drive folder so any changes automatically sync to my NAS. My NAS runs daily snapshots and is backed up at night to an external HDD as well as a cloud backup. Synology Drive also automatically syncs any changes to a copy of my music on my mobile phone. So along with my SD card, I always have 6 copies of my Music and raid redundancy. Now admittedly my music collection is not massive and I’m only a “Bedroom DJ” so this could well be conceived as over kill but personally I would always air on the side of caution especially if DJ’ing is your source of income. At a minimum I would advise weekly backups to an external HDD and/or cloud storage. You don’t need a NAS to do this, just a few simple scripts would achieve the same results.
Not sure if I’m doing this quoted stuff properly… I’m not quite sure what a “packed” SD card means.
When I refer to Engine OS I’m talking about my computer and when I refer to firmware I’m talking about the physical player. So since there is no music on my Engine OS library, that’s what I’m needing to rebuild…from my SD card.
This is why I was asking the quickest way to copy music from my SD card to an external drive (SSD). Thank you for the tip on Carbon Copy Cloner. Because it’s not advisable to just transfer directly from SD card to SSD correct?
What an excellent response and I followed everything you were saying. This helps greatly. I wish I knew more about NAS and Synology. So are your daily backups from Time Machine?
How did you get music into the SD card?
Did you use sync manager from your Engine Desktop collection?
For the sake of clarity lets use this loose terms
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The collection on your desktop is Engine DJ Library (desktop)
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The collection on your SD card which you perform with is your Engine OS drive.
No I don’t personally use Time Machine although if you are familiar with that I would certainly recommend it. I have multiple shared folders which I map to my computers/ laptops. The shared folders are stored on my NAS. Having one central store for my files means I don’t need to run full backups of all my machines which saves a LOT of storage space. So essentially my MacBook could die tomorrow and I could just replace it, map the shared drives and have everything back up and running instantly. There are a few exceptions like files stored in my home directory, Engine DJ and Sartato library database backups for example but I run daily cron jobs (schedule tasks essentially) to copy these files to one of the shared folders.
Time Machine would probably be your best option, make sure you select your music source files and your database backup (/Users/Username/Music/Engine Library Backup) The initial backup may take some time for a large music collection but subsequent backups will be incremental so fairly quick.
Time Machine is definitely a good way of backing a Mac up, but it requires a hard drive sitting in your network.
WD do some good options for that, particularly the 2 bay NAS drives. They are easy to set up too.
To add too the comment above, I keep my music library on a MacBook, I then have it copied occasionally onto an external USB hard drive, but then I also have a time capsule doing auto backups of my MacBook when I turn it on. The library is again copied onto the SSD sat in my prime 2, and most of it is also on 3 different USB sticks I keep for DJing.
So at the very end of it all I have it backed up several times one way or another.
I manually(drag & drop) bring in music from one of my external hard drives to my Engine DJ Library. Then I drag music from my Engine DJ Library Collection into my SD card (drive) all within the Engine DJ Library.
I don’t know how to recover library from the SD card…officially
Perhaps others may know
Using Lexicon or similar app?
I don’t have Lexicon but I’m already sold on it after seeing one of their instructional videos. But it’s only a host program, it doesn’t keep the actual music file. Similar to Engine DJ though their purposes are different.