Reinstall gives me a headache. The amount of time it takes for Plex to reindex my library, much less how long it would take to do yours, would drive me insane. The last time I did have to go through that process I think it took 3 days to go through my movies and another 4 for my tv shows…
I do use Sonar and Radarr to keep up with the folder/file naming structure for everything in my library - would think that would make it a little faster, but I can’t really tell…
Its usually not used until the evening by myself or family members. It seems to be crashing during the Scheduled Task which is set for 5am through 1pm. With the exception of a couple days ago and it happened during a viewing at around 8-10 pm is why I finally reached out here for help
If you decided to bite the bullet and “conform to recommended file/folder structuring” 
I would definitely look into DrivePool and Sonarr/Radarr…
There have been very few times in the last year or so that I have seen any kind of quiick response from the developers - I believe they do monitor community input from the forums, but in my experiece, you usually just have to wait around for the release notes for the next release before you see what is getting fixed…
Understood and agreed. Please don’t take it as being stubborn as I am not. BUT I also don’t want to create more work as I spend many hours a week adding and labeling to insure the smoothest use. I do not have thousands of movies in a single folder nor just on a drive. Each drive has a combination of folders as pictured previously and in those will be the movies. If there are extras then that will have its own folder with the movie in it. This process was taken and followed from the plex how to’s.
Oh trust me, many of us are likely to spend hours updating our libraries… I spend many an evening thinking to myself… “I cannot believe how much feckin’ time I am spending doing this!!”
For me, I re-encode virtually every video file to ensure that BluRay versions can “fit up my pipe” while leaving some bandwidth to spare… Or re-ripping my CD’s to FLAC once I finally realised how much better they sound.
Judging by how much content you have, this absolutely will take ages to achieve, but as with everything plex, it is an ongoing journey.
Just start with one of your drives, and gradually over time work your way through.
One of the biggest problems with having “multiple” movies in the same folder, is when you add another one, Plex sees a change to that folder which then affects how it sees the other movies.
I’m sure you have seen it when you scroll through your movie collection in Plex, and it looks like it needs to “re-draw” the artwork. That is because Plex has seen a change to the content in that one folder, that has tons of files in it.
Indeed… The extras probably wouldn’t even work otherwise.
Completely makes sense. Is the Files 2 Folder the best application for this endeavor? 
I’d be fairly confident your problem is due to having so many files in a flat folder structure (as per your screenshot).
If plex sees a file change in a folder it rescan everything in that folder. So if you have 500 movie files in a folder and add 1 then 501 scans need to be done. The larger the library the larger the scans and you see the problem.
Use subfolders for each movie. Then only that subfolder is scanned when added or changed. I’ve a mid sized plex server (3000 movies, 500 shows) and have no issues since I fixed up my media structure.
You should be able to use a simple for loop to automate the moving of the stuff, at least that is what I done.
And lastly, just for reference, I have…
1K Movies
265 TV Shows which consists of 10.5K episodes
5.5K Music
Which I know is a blip compared to your collection, however when I scan these libraries, it takes…
Movies = 10 seconds
TV Shows = 15 seconds
Music = 7 seconds
This is with an 8 year old HP server, with Dual Xeon processors, SSD’s for the OS and Plex metadata, and the content storage is 2x RAID10 arrays (10.9T + 15.9T) connected via USB 3.
What are these programs and would they help me move this library into individual folders as recommended?
Actually that would work really well…
For every MKV in MySourceFolder (
Make a folder with the same name
Move the file into the folder
Move onto the next item in my list
)
Then do the same for the MP4’s etc.
Anyways… Off to watch some stuff… Good luck @ZEALOUSDRAGON
I’m sure I have the actual for loop I used on my PC. I’ll dig it out later and post here for reference.
PLEASE do as I have not used this before. And the file2folder… Thats will take me months to finish hahaha
Actually this came up before and I found the thread Best Folder Structure For Fastest Library Scan? - #25 by dokuro
I’m on linux but think windows was also covered here Best Folder Structure For Fastest Library Scan? - #18 by TheRealMojoJojo
Try on a couple of files first to test before doing on your full files.
Sonarr and Radarr would likely help you move a lot of this stuff around, but they too want to have a single drive, so you’d most likely have to play with it to try and trick it into doing one drive at a time. In theory (I haven’t done this), but you can set them up, tell it to import your current movie/tv episode location, and it will try and match each of those to a movie, then move it to where it thinks is the correct location for the library.
As for using Drive pool vs Drive Bender, I went with drive pool because at the time I had heard that drive bender had stopped development. All in all, I’ve been happy with drive pool, so I haven’t really bothered to look elsewhere. It fit my needs – mainly, if drive pool ever stopped working, or an entire drive died or two or three etc the rest of the data would still be fine. No fancy striping, etc. Just merge the drives into a single letter, and it has done that in spades (with the exception of not being able to support plex’es hard links, so no metadata on a drive pool).
I have more storage space, but definitely not as many movies as what you currently have. I just pruned a LOT, but this what remains:
~11k movies
~20k tv episodes for 317 shows
Stored over 38 drives and ~300TB with a hybrid RAID/DrivePool.
I would re-evaluate Drive Bender, but it apparently doesn’t currently support Windows 11, and they “hope” to have a release that does by the end of the year. That’s a non-starter for me. Also appears that Drive Bender does not support Plex’s metadata either. I really wish plex would rethink using hardlinks as a janky database – especially since they already are using SQLite.
One more vote for DrivePool.
They are both library management tools… Sonarr manages television shows, Radarr manages movies, oh an Lidarr manages music… They handle file/folder renaming, metadata, etc…
All of them do function a lot better if your destination paths are set to a single drive, ie E:\TV Shows, E:\Movies\ with individual subfolders under each.
I can’t really speak to the other options, but utilizing DrivePool in conjuction with the other tools could make the process a little easier. It could definitely make it easier going forward for you.
With DrivePool you could shift over with everything in place. Add your storage drives to a pool - it presents itself as a single drive letter. Set Radarr library path to X:\Movies - scan one of your movie folders and let it move the files into the correct folder path structure. After everything is moved into the pool, clean up the left over folders and at the end remove the drive letters for each of the physical drives.
Further to @anon5074910’s post, I took the batch file commands and modified it slightly to end up with…
@ECHO OFF
SET DESTDIR=“P:\Plex\ToSort\TMP\Old”
SET FILETYPE=logCD /D %DESTDIR%
for %%I in (*.%FILETYPE%) do (
ECHO Creating Dir “%%~nI”
MD “%%~nI”ECHO Moving file “%%~nxI”
MOVE “%%~nxI” “%%~nI”)
CD /D %USERPROFILE%\Desktop
By adding a few variables in there, you can control what file types it effects, and which destination location it works in.
If you need any help making it work, gimme a scream 
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