Hi All
I’ve been slowly building my Plex library before Plex even existed (started with XBMC on the original Xbox way back when). After more than a decade collecting and using Plex (along with media indexing), my Plex lIbrary folder has grown to about 300 GB in size with about 600k files within the Library folder. I’ve also started sharing my library with family, having about 6-7 family members in various time zones using Plex almost 24/7.
This unfortunately has had me scratching my head a bit on how to regularly backup the Library in the event of data loss / corruption. Note this is just the library, not the media itself.
Plex has a great KB on how to backup, essentially saying to backup your entire Library folder, but when this is 300 GB, it poses some interesting challenges:
- To get a consistent database backup, you should really stop Plex before executing the backup task.
- Using tar or tar / gzip (or zip, gzip or other compression mechanism) can take about 3-4 hours.
- Using rsync to a remote host can take 12-24 hours in my experience
- Using sometihg like rclone to backup to Amazon Drive/Google Drive is even worse, taking about 40 hours (with subsequent incrementals taking about 4-8 hours).
- Excluding the .bif files will significantly reduce the size, but the .bif files only account for about 2% of the total number of files. It’s been my experience that the sheer amount of data Plex stores within the Library folder (excluding the Caches which can be rebuilt) causes any kind of activity requiring action on all the files to take an enormously long time (when your LIbrary is 300GB).
Bandwidth isn’t an issue (250mbit pipe), but still, uploading a backup can take hours.
Ideally, I’d have a daily backup for 2 weeks and a monthly backup for 12 months. I can’t imagine having to rebuild this were I to lose it (I also have a lot of custom metadata that I’ve edited in Plex over the years).
Anyway, just curious if others with big libraries such as myself have a regular backup strategy for their Library folders (again, not the media, just the Library folders).
Thanks!