Lost all my playlist

I’ve not personally seen a Sonos update wipe a playlist of mine and I’d personally prefer to go with a Sonos official (supported) update/process, than say a 3rd party unsupported method (no disrespect to anyone, when I say that of course).

@ratty’s advice in his posts above seems to me to be an excellent way to proceed to recover lost playlists. It’s what I (and I’m sure many others) would have recommended to you. That’s if you have not done that already.

As always though, the decisions are for you to make.

Dear Ratty, Ken and the others that contributed:

I wanted to thank you all for the amazing support and quick response. Thanks to your guidance, I was able to successfully retrieve my old playlists from my ZP100 :) The family and I are incredibly grateful!

After spending hours on the community platform in search for solutions, I was surprised to see how much was there. It’s really nice to see such an active and supportive community. The support I got from the community was actually much better than the support I got from the call center.

Reflecting on what happened, I wish I had gone there directly in the first place before I decided to change my set up. I relied on the S2 app instructions (e.g. how to add a new product) but there are no warnings at all that you risk of losing your playlists with a hard reset (just that you have to reinstall music and voice services - see below). In fact, the directions are also misleading since they tell you to hard reset your players to add them to the system. Any person who doesn’t have the time/knowledge to search the support pages before hand is at risk… Sonos has to do a better job to improve the instructions in the app. 

Finally, I still don’t understand why the playlists are stored in speaker memory. They should be tied to the user account and stored in the cloud. They should be accessible anywhere, easily usable with any system (in prime residence, at secondary residence, at friend’s house), and backed up in case one has a fire, loss, theft, etc. That seems table stakes for any modern consumer service these days.

I hope Sonos will draw lessons from this incident and prevent future customers - who may not be lucky to have a ZP100 in their cellar - to lose everything…

Well, it’s good that we were able to help you out. It’s not so good that the official support channels were not. 

I’m surprised the controller even led you down the road of adding products, with or without a reset. All you had was a new router, presumably with a different set of WiFi credentials. Normally the controller is supposed to offer you the appropriate “new router” help article if it can’t see the system. 

Looking back at your original post you might have jumped the gun and reset everything at the outset, which was clearly the wrong thing to do. A salutary lesson learned.

On the question of Sonos Playlist backup into the cloud, I actually think it’s a good idea. Sonos Playlists are however a very old feature, so retrofitting cloud backup (and restore) would presumably take a bit of work. Priorities, priorities. 

yanndv,

It’s truly nice to hear that you managed to recover/restore your setup/playlists etc; or at least the majority and it’s true that without that zone player in the cellar (and @ratty’s excellent advice), that all might otherwise have been lost.

It is quite a rare event to see a user reset each one of their devices, before they land here in the community to seek assistance and quite often the ‘wheel can quickly be put back on’ by suggesting they perhaps wire one of their non-reset players to then go onto restore all.

That said, I too would like to see a copy of a users settings/playlists etc; saved to their online Sonos account and be able to (somehow) restore them from there, rather than relying on the ‘perhaps’ last resort of using a non-reset device from the same HH.

I guess if this was an unfortunate ‘regular’ occurrence, we would see Sonos solve the matter with an additional backup process, but as @ratty mentions, it’s perhaps about development priorities and cost etc. I agree it’s an important issue, but certainly on the face of reports here in the community, it remains a scarce event.

At least on this occasion it’s nice to be able to say "All’s well, that ends well”.

Anyhow... Happy New Year to you and the Family too. 

Dear Ratty and Ken, many thanks again for your invaluable help here!! I would happily send you a nice bottle of wine if you share your email with me as you really deserve it!

Ratty, to be clear, I didn’t jump the gun and reset all players at the outset. I tried to follow the S2 app guidelines (without checking the Sonos support pages first, my bad...). Since factory resetting the 1st Sonos one player enabled me to find it, I just carried on with the others until they were all back on unaware of the consequences…

Thanks again for all your help and happy new year!! You guys are rock stars!