While I have seen this covered numerous times on Reddit and everyone points to an “extended guide” ( on how to move your data location to a different drive, I have followed it a million times and even watched a video that followed it, and the “LocalAppDataPath” is ignored and it continues to rebuild the directory in the "C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server" location. It seems pretty striaght forward, so at this point I have to believe this guide was written before an update superseded that advice/made it obsolete. I would appreciate any help in this matter as this directory is just going to town on my SSD drive and I would like to move it to a more appropriate drive.
Plex server is running under a different Windows user account than the one of which you are editing the registry branch.
Usually happens if Plex is either running as a Windows system service, or is started by the Windows task scheduler. But it can also happen if you have more than one Windows user account and for some reason the wrong user is being loaded upon system start. (Windows usually auto-loads the last logged-in user account, even if you don’t type in your Windows password!)
Thanks for that insight, and it would make sense.
To make things easier, here are the details of my current install:
Installed Plex using a non-admin Windows account, therefore, it asked for admin credentials when installing. (Not sure if this throws it for a loop, I have seen this in the past).
Running a default installation, so the Plex Update Service is executed under the “Local System” account.
I made the regedit update to the “HKEY_CURRENT_USER” key, which is definitely not the local system account. And because it is a non-admin account, I have to elevate via the admin account when running regedit. Could that be an issue? I always thought you have to elevate to do anything with regedit.
I manually start Plex, under the non-admin account, and it does not auto-start with Windows.
The updated location in the registry key is fully accessible by the non-admin account as well as the “Local System” account.
Any additional insights or guidance after this would be greatly appreciated.
I hope that helps and thank you again for providing different insights into what may be causing the issue.
I was not referring to the update service. Plex server itself can be turned into a service, if desired. That way it does run as soon as the computer is switched on, no matter who is logged on, if anyone. But this requires additional software.
It depends on which branch you want to edit.
If you run regedit as Admin, then CURRENT_USER will point to the Admin account.
But you want to edit the USER branch of the restricted user account, therefore you must not run regedit in elevated mode.
