Changing drives

Plex Media Server
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Server Version#: 1.19.1.2645-ccb6eb67e
Player Version#:

Hi,
I have a question about folders/drives.
I have two USB drives that I use to store content and unfortunately (minor I know) I named them Content 2TB (Library called “videos”) and Content 3TB (Library called “family”)
I am in the process to use a Drobo 5d3 for all storage and I would like to create one drive where I then add folders for all current content.
But I was hoping to name the Drobo drive just (Content or Media) and then have folders in there with the content of “Content 2TB” and “Content 3TB”.
I moved all content before and it worked well. I cloned a drive using carbon copy and then I shut plex down, renamed the new drive to Content 3TB (it is a 5B drive now) and renamed the old drive, restarted plex and all was good. What I consider good is that nothing shows up as recently added and everything stays as it was.

I did a test with the Drobo and it failed and I aborted. I closed the content from "Content 3TB) to the Drobo (i had named the Drobo drive “Media” for my test and then I added the Media folder as an additional folder to my Plex video Library. I thought by doing this it would show that there were two of each, but it would not show new items under recently added. Well, I was wrong. When I added the media folder, it immediately started to add recently added (all content) files. I stopped and reverted the change and fixed it.

So here is my question (finally). I am ok to redo the Library called (family) because it is small and I also don’t show “recently added” for it so I don’t care if it needs to be re-created from scratch.
But I would like to, if possible, clone the other drive (the video library) that is called “content 2TB” to my new drive (called “media”) without having any changes to my recently added or other content. I assume there is no way and I just need to live with the fact that from no on all drives are always called “content 2TB” but I wanted to check.

thanks

claus

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here you go

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I saw this article but it was not clear to me if for the Moving Content to a New Location part, this means that my library will stay exactly the same way it is, no recently added content will change or be refreshed as part of the move, etc.

Second, is there a way to save whatever determines that my library looks like before I start all this, so in case it goes all wrong, I can roll it all back ?
thanks

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Your library stays intact if you follow the sequence described in the article.
Plex stores a fingerprint of your files. So when you add the folder from the new location, it’ll recognize that the new files belong to the existing ones.

In late 2019 I’ve moved my entire library to a new mounting-point on my existing server. Worked like a charm.

The note in the article about backing up your Plex data folder refers to this instruction:

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ok I did and it did not work… Here is what I did.

  1. turn off auto delete
  2. shut down Plex
  3. back up all data
  4. clone my drive to a new drive (media)
  5. renamed old drive (was not sure about that step)
  6. started Plex and added new directory to the library (left old one)
  7. Plex started to scan library and overall it looked good except 15 items or so were added to recently added, all had a garbage bin icon on them.
  8. I rolled all changes back by restoring. I am not sure if step 5 was wrong. but without renaming the old drive and just adding the new one, Plex adds hundreds of items to recently added.

suggestions ?

thanks

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does anybody have any suggestions ? If i would just know how I can either avoid the issue i have in step 7 or how to get rid of these 15 and leave all others intact, that would be great

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