I often think what amount of work went into me setting up PMS and then read Topics of people suddenly loosing their metadata due to hardware failures, bugs, etc.
Copying the complete Plex Media Server Metadata Directory as a backup is of course possible as it is, but due to the enormous amount of files and folders, it takes ages to back it up/copy it.
If you had a feature built into PMS that would let you create a backup copy only of the Metadata, but not the actual files. It would not need to backup the cover art, theme Music and Background images, as those could easily be re-downloaded from the web after a restore. But it would back up the media associations (like manual matches etc.), the sections and their settings as well as the PMS Server settings.
Producing such a “metadata-skeleton” could surely be done quicker, possibly even scheduled, and maybe even do differential backups?
By the way, if anyone has a good solution to backing up the metadata in existing versions of PMS, please let me know, as I look for one that would work for me.
Hope somebody would find that helpful too.
I too would find this extremely helpful. Having put in the time more than once to rebuilt the entire library with tweaks… having a way to export just the metadata/sort information. It would redownload the artwork on a restore.
I’d rather like to see a feature to export scraped and user corrected metadata to a file next to the movie to be read by the pms while rebuilding the library. Saves you alot of time and could be realized as a .zip container called .pmx or something else 
+1 my PMS Libraby is growing and I have corrected many things I don’t want to loose.
Richard.
I have recently changed my HDD and restored my PMs from Time Machine with all the custom and automatic metadata without any problem.
Said that i also support the initiative to backup directly from the PMS, through the GUI, or the suggestion from michael383, from the internal database.
Maybe someone has created a unix-like script to do that directly from the database??
Best Regards
Id rather plex insert (and read) the meta data into the media when possible so that it benefits more than just plex. if you are going to do some type of export/backup please do it in a format that is easily parsed or already supported by other programs like XML.
Nice Idea. But it's like having Itunes stuffed with untaggable wav files. Correct me if i'm wrong, but MKV's aren't taggable yet (or not userfriendly enough by now). If your suggestion is taken into consideration i'd like to see more than just your or mine option to export metadata. there are so much formats out there, that a single xml library (like iTunes) is not that easy to handle but easier to rebuild in case something is broken IF your files contain a metadata header (mp4). If that is not the case, saved and readable metadata is much easier.
please excuse my english (german living in germany)
cheers (so many users think of exporting metadata :D)
michael
it is totally possible to tag mkv files.
Wow. Didn't know that. I have to look for Tools like iflicks for mkv ;)
Ty
Michael
+1
