Moving Plex Media Server between Windows and Linux is possible.
I have a medium sized collection. My wife and I have spent days organizing the information. I didn’t want to lose this effort.
The first few tries were moving the Plex Media Server folder to the Linux Plex Media Server folder. It didn’t work. The Plex service failed to start and displayed an error.
I looked closer at the files in the Plex Media Server folder. Some the folders had OS specific files in them. I deleted those folders. I also deleted all the Cache folders. This left seven folders: Media, Metadata, Plug-in Support, Plugins, Scanners, Site Configurations, Thumbnails. Four folders contained data: Media, Metadata, Plug-in Support, and Plugins. In my research, these four folders contain the data and the media images for the library. The other three folders where empty.
I copied the four folders and the three empty ones. I’m not sure if Plex Media Server uses the three empty folders, but what’s the harm if it doesn’t?
The moment of truth was at hand. I issued the command to start the Plex service. It started! When I launched the Plex website, all my movies and shows displayed! Success!
In Linux, you’ll need to mount the network share as a local drive. This means you’ll need to change library paths. Not a big deal, but this does trigger a rescan of your entire collection.
Update
I had to reinstall Plex and found some gaps in the above instructions.
- Install Plex on Linux
- Configure Plex via the web interface. At this point you’ll have an empty library.
- Shutdown plex sudo service plexmediaserver stopt
- Copy the media files as described above
- Start plex sudo service plexmediaserver start
- Change the Library paths to new paths. This will trigger a rescan of the files
- After complete, re fresh the plex website
