Here’s my question.
I have two PMS one on my laptop and on on my Nvidia Shield.
The one on my Shield has 2000 movies in a library on a harddrive connected via USB. I moved the data storage from the shield to the HD some time ago as it was using up all the space in the shield. So… how do I back up all the data? Not the movies. I have them backed up. But when I detach the HD from the shield and plug it into my Mac, I see four folders, two of them have red dots.
Do I just copy the folders (not the one with the 2000 movies, but the other three, to a new location? And if I do that, how do I resore the data to a new Shield?
If you have moved it to external storage then the plex database is located under the Android directory found in the root. Usually something like this:
/storage/ drivename /android/data/com.plexapp.mediaserver.smb/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Databases
That is just the database and not the meta data.
PMS on Nvidia Shield- damaged database repair - Plex Media Server / Desktops & Laptops - Plex Forum
You may not need to disconnect the drive from the Shield.
The Shield has a SMB server, allowing access to the internal storage over the network.
You can enable it in the Shield settings: Device Preferences -> Storage -> Transfer Files over Local Network
I’ve a 2015 Shield with an internal drive. I can access the internal storage by enabling the SMB server and mapping it to a drive on my desktop PC.
Where is the meta data? Do you know?
The storage is not in the shield. It’s in the external HD.
Thanks!
I cannot replicate your setup, as I do not have an external drive on my Shield.
You might want test the SMB server capability
If the external drive is accessible it would let you move data to/from the Shield without having to physically disconnect the external drive. Not just the Plex server data, but also any movies/tv shows/etc stored on the drive.
I tested network access from the external drive through my Shield about a year ago and it is one of things (among many) that Plex needs to update/fix. They need to stop adding new features and fix the old important ones first.
This is from memory so the exact details may be a little fuzzy but accessing the external drive as a network share from my PC was EXTREMELY slow. It is about 10 times faster accessing/copying files/etc…t by plugging it directly into my PC via USB. I also found that properties like create and modified dates would get changed when copied over which would then in turn mess up my photo libraries etc…
The last thing is this features uses an older version of drivers which is not even supported directly by Windows 10 (they support the new version). You have to actual add the old drivers to Windows 10 to get access to the external drive through your shield across the network.
The final thing is the shield with external drive I find that the database gets corrupted very easily. One of the things I found to improve this problem is disabling network access to the external drive.
I forget the exact location just look it is in the same general location as the database where you will find directory names as a long string of numbers and letters.
The database files are few and small and easy to backup. Not sure if it is worth backing up the metadata as in my case it is over 8 GB and 330,000 files. All those small files take forever to transfer. Plus I have never heard of some replacing the meta data during a restore, just the database (not that I have looked).
No idea about the database corruption.
Nvidia updated the SMB server to use SMB3 several months back. It improved speed as well.
Really, great I will have to try it out again. I had read elsewhere on the forums that SMB was implemented by Plex (since Nivdia had not)
The SMB server s/w was delivered by Plex at one time. The update with SMB3 capability was delivered as part of a Shield s/w update from Nvidia a few months back. I don’t know who wrote the code, but it is much faster and more stable than before. Definitely worth checking out.
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