Server Version#: 1.20.2.3402
Player Version#: 1.20.0.1406-f47a81b7
I’m reformatting my EX2 from RAID-1 to JBOD in order to extend the amount of space I have available, and have backed up all my media files. However, I cannot find the metadata for backing up despite all my efforts:
In both the Finder and in terminal when I view the Plex folder within EX2 there are no hidden directories.
I can’t figure out how to SSH into the EX2 directly in order to view any hidden directories at the root level. I’ve turned on SSH within the EX2 Settings but I wasn’t successful SSH’ing via terminal, as the connection was constantly refused.
As per this page regarding metadata location there is no such folder (but perhaps logging into the EX2 root I would see it, I don’t know).
I’m a bit at a loss and really don’t want to lose all the metadata for 6TB worth of movies…any help is appreciated, thanks.
Update:
To be precise, the location of the Plex metadata according to that aforementioned page is:
/mnt/HD/HD_a2/plex_conf/Plex Media Server/
I discovered in the WD manual the default username for accessing via ssh is sshd, and was able to successfully login with that info. After exploring the directories I did find the /Plex Media Server directory with the following internals:
root@MyCloudEX2Ultra Plex Media Server # ls -al
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Oct 7 02:35 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 27 2020 ..
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 7 02:35 Cache
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 7 02:15 Codecs
drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 Oct 7 02:14 Crash Reports
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 6 2020 Diagnostics
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 7 02:34 Logs
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 29 2020 Media
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Mar 7 2020 Metadata
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Jan 27 2020 Plug-in Support
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 27 2020 Plug-ins
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1050 Oct 7 02:35 Preferences.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4 Aug 21 07:24 plexmediaserver.pid
I had trouble getting scp (secure copy) to work so connected via sftp and am currently copying everything over using the command:
get -r /mnt/HD/HD_a2/Nas_Prog/plex_conf/Plex\ Media\ Server
We’ll see if it’s successful, and of course the real test will be reformatting the WD EX2, copying everything back, and seeing if it works.
During the ftp copy process I’m getting alot of “not a regular file” responses like the following:
/mnt/HD/HD_a2/Nas_Prog/plex_conf/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/8/28d7207dd43194633392d6ebb22a9c403c5712f.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.imdb_e7c462917929311acc713b1bf96480ac2d2a6573: not a regular file
/mnt/HD/HD_a2/Nas_Prog/plex_conf/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/8/28d7207dd43194633392d6ebb22a9c403c5712f.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.imdb_d87a6eb412a9417bcb3685ce5595d1b556b57405: not a regular file
/mnt/HD/HD_a2/Nas_Prog/plex_conf/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/8/28d7207dd43194633392d6ebb22a9c403c5712f.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.imdb_4a54e24ac68c519b86976ecd176acd5e9d2c1b8a: not a regular file
/mnt/HD/HD_a2/Nas_Prog/plex_conf/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/8/28d7207dd43194633392d6ebb22a9c403c5712f.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.imdb_f7d35df574b2a30e5c85a50ad5874f409f1cf59f: not a regular file
After searching this wider forum a bit, I believe these are bundles as per this thread here.
Is it ok to ignore this and perhaps Plex will re-create these bundles? Or is this wishful thinking and I need to stop the copy and make sure ALL of these files are getting transferred properly?
UPDATE:
I figured out the scp command, naturally it was a syntax error and the correct command turned out to be:
After completing the copy the bundles missing from ftp were there when using scp so that was good. But comparing the size of the various directories (using du -sh *), there were some interesting differences :
How could I end up with more content on the destination side than the source after copying? I have no idea. The PMS service has been off since I started this whole process, so nothing has changed from its activity nor have I manually modified any of these folders.
Final note, it’s now been almost two weeks since starting this effort. I re-formatted the EX2 as JBOD twice since the first time I neglected to select the “Spanning” option so it treated the two hard drives in the NAS as two separate volumes rather than a single volume spanning multiple drives.
I installed Plex on the newly formatted EX2 which installed version 1.18.4.2171, then turned the server off and copied over the media and metadata:
SSH into the EX2 (Terminal - new remote connection - user “sshd”)
Navigate to Plex home: cd /mnt/HD/HD_a2/Nas_Prog/plex_conf/Plex\ Media\ Server
Open another terminal window and navigated to local directory of PMS files
In local terminal window start the copy: scp -r . sshd@192.168.0.111:"/mnt/HD/HD_a2/Nas_Prog/plex_conf/Plex\ Media\ Server"
I was a little sloppy with these steps the first time and got an error “This server is unclaimed and not secure”, and it wouldn’t allow me to claim it (nothing happened when I clicked the “Claim this server” option) so uninstalled/ reinstalled Plex. The 2nd attempt it wouldn’t let me connect to the server at all, so I uninstalled the PMS and removed all files from the NAS. On the 3rd attempt I followed the above steps very carefully, and when I turned on the server it allowed me to connect and showed all the metadata. Success!
