Hi All,
As the topic suggests, I’m wondering if (but guessing there’s not) a way to separate out .bif video preview thumb files from .bundle dirs. In other words, store the preview thumbs on a completely different part of the filesystem (and hence a different disk).
The reason for this oddly specific question is that .bif files account for the majority of space in my /Media directory, and while I don’t particularly care how much space they take up, all those GB are quite time consuming for offsite backups.
If my server were to get nuked, I don’t want to lose my metadata. But I don’t mind rebuilding all the preview thumbs, even if that were to take a month or whatever. So I’d love to backup everything except the thumbnails.
I run PMS in a VM, whose host bare metal is in my basement. Just because I’m the paranoid sort, I backup the Plex VM images (via snapshot) weekly and ship them off site. (Along with other servers.) Makes the restore process real simple, which has actually saved me twice with Plex.
As my collection has grown, I’ve had to add space and I’m up to about 440GB used in the /Media dir.
Like I said, total space isn’t the problem. I’ve got plenty of capacity on that server, but it would be cool to optimize my backups. I know I could cut down my video preview thumbs space by increasing GenerateBIFFrameInterval (and regenerating!), but the more precise the thumbs the better so I’m good with the default.
I’m wondering if I should switch up to backing up at the PMS file system level and just use something like rsync --exclude='*.bif'
Does anyone know if that would be acceptable? In other words, if I did a restore of everything except files with the .bif extension, would PMS crash out due to their being missing or just politely rebuild those files? Or a third thing?
The only problem with that is I have the /Media directory on a regular ol’ disk partition and not LVM, so I can’t backup off a snapshot. The concern being that I’d have to either stop PMS during the backup, or disable the generation of metadata during that time to prevent the DB from going out of sync with the file system. No?
Thanks!
