Hi, my PC died and I had to reformat…I have all my media but not my media databases, other crap can be downloaded of course but does Plex backup the database itself? If so if I reinstall Plex is there something I’m supposed to do to restore it? I’m a Plex pass owner if that makes any difference?
It’s up to the user to back up their own data.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201539237-backing-up-plex-media-server-data/
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Ok thanks.
Often that why many of us set the folder to something other than the OS drive. 
As @JoePhelps already mentioned, Plex does not backup the database to the cloud. Plex does, however, create local backups of the database (which won’t help you either right now, unfortunately). You can change the directory that these local backups are stored in, which is what @Xhaka hinted at. That directory can be on another drive or even another system. You can also backup/sync that local database backup anywhere you want.
However, the database does not contain the content metadata such as posters, video thumbnails etc. So I personally just sync/backup the entire Plex data directory off site. If I ever loose my Plex data directory for whatever reason, I just download it from the backup, put it on another server and everything is as it was. Set something like that up for yourself once and you won’t encounter this issue again.
Thanks you guys…I kept my media on a RAID array separate from my OS drive but yeah, I’ll be setting up a backup on my storage array too so that I don’t run into this issue again. I don’t care about the posters and stuff, that just takes time and bandwidth to fix but the db itself will need to be built from scratch and then I’ll need to go through all my series to mark off what I’ve watched and haven’t watched yet.
So by doing a fresh install and having the media in the old place all I need to do is put preferences.xml back in its place and all my shows / movies will be marked as watched ?
No. You need at least the old main database file as well.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202485658-restore-a-database-backed-up-via-scheduled-tasks/
Thank you
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