Back up from Unitiserve

No, you cannot do that. You need to back up to a Nas. As your Serve is empty I’d sell it, get a good Nas and rip the albums with dbpoweramp. You can then drag and drop from the nas to usb drives. 

You can certainly drag US files to a USB drive, I do this regularly to transfer them to a portable player and to USB storage for my car. It will work, but I would still recommend setting up a proper automatic backup. It’s a little fiddly to do, but Naim support will be able to help you with it, and once done, the process is fully automated and requires no further effort from you. 

To elaborate on my earlier post, you will not be able to restore your MQ file CD rips and playlists from a USB copy of the files. You would only be able to put them in the Downloads folder. Also, I would strongly recommend that you store them as FLACs as this has more versatile metadata and reduced file size. Then I would buy a ‘proper’ NAS, such as a Synology DS116, or a comparable model from QNAP or Netgear. Put a 2TB Western Digital Red drive in it. Then phone Naim support and ask Phil Harris to guide you through the setup in the Unitiserve and NAS setup menus. 

The advantage of doing it like this is that the process, once set up, is fully automated. You have the additional advantage that if your US fails again, or if you decide to sell it, you can immediately start streaming music from the backup without having to wait for a repair. 

Many thanks for this very helpful advice. I was coming to the conclusion that a Synology NAS drive was the only effective solution although was intending to go for the one bay, 1tb version.

A 1TB drive may well be enough for you. If you’ve been ripping to WAV, changing to FLAC will significantly reduce file size. On the other hand, music is increasingly available in the form of hi-res downloads, and these will eat your storage space very rapidly.