I think for everyone there comes a time when he/she needs to completely re-setup their system. On a huge PLEX library with hundreds of TV-Shows, movies and other stuff this sometimes can take like a whole day or more. And this is only for scanning and fetching the online metadata, posters and backgrounds. In addition to that you will have to fix incorrect matches again. Change some posters and backdrops back to your preferred ones. Create your collections again. And maybe you even have edited some metadata manually that you would now have to reedit. Which I think would be the worst case scenario.
Why not export all metadata to single file which could be stored in the movies folder each time you edit something.
In addition to that the selected poster and background image could be stored in the movies folder as well.
After setting up the system again the PMS would first take a look if such files exist in a movies folder. And if that is the case just load the metadata from the file instead of an online source.
That would save a tremendous amount of time. And a good way to avoid the loss of all edited metadata which in some cases may have been a lot of work to edit it in the first place.
+1 here
+1 here too. I’m trying to duplicate my library for my parents and this feature would help.
Hi everyone…
… just wanted to let you know that I am currently looking into this old topic.
I recently had to re-setup my entire PLEX-database and was very frustrated that I had to… all my previous work on my database was lost due to a problem while upgrading my NAS software.
However that made think of this “export/import metadata to/from file thing” again.
So just wanted to let everyone know that I am now “finally” looking into this and will report the progress here.
But I am also curious to know… Is someone still as interested in this feature as I am… and did someone come up with another or even better solution yet?
Best regards
Daniel
I’m certainly interested in this. I can’t store full image backups of my drives and this would save me a HDD crash immensely! Plus the backup and restore options bork a few things currently, like Plex Mix would not play on my old restored music library. As soon as I setup a new library Plex Mix was working again.
I would love a more elegant way of doing this, and exporting the image files, and something like an NFO for the information would be great. Using the NFO XBMC Scanner that’s currently out stops trailers and other things doesn’t it? or am I wrong on that one? If so, I’m off to sort out some NFO’s now haha.
Hi!
Waiting for this feature 
Please keep us up to date!
Braz
would be nice if we could sync stuff up like this to local or cloud storage provider(i.e. Google Drive) 
i have a pretty fat library size and would be sad if i had to redo all that metadata
Early 2021 clean-up: duplicate
While this post is pre-dating some of the duplicates… those have partially a significant amount of votes while this one got orphaned.
