I would like to have the ability to archive (move) some media to external storage like USB/ESATA hdd. And not lose media information on the server like watched status and customized media info. This feature would be wonderful for freeing up space for media not regularly being watched like Holiday movies and home movies.
You can do this already, within the file system of the OS. You just copy the media to the new drive, not to the root, but to a folder, such as /media.
Then point your library in Plex to that folder and let it detect the duplicates.
Then go back into the OS and delete the folders/files that you had in the original location.
Everything should be just as you had it for Watched Status, and everything should be good. More info here: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201154537-Move-Media-Content-to-a-New-Location
I did something slightly similar by moving a number of tv shows to a `finished tv show library’, which worked really well. All my watch statuses and other information were kept.
@WilhelmStroker said:
I did something slightly similar by moving a number of tv shows to a `finished tv show library’, which worked really well. All my watch statuses and other information were kept.
I believe @cayars does something like this as well. His TV shows library points to both the continuing and ended folders and then the series folders can get moved back and forth as needed. It’s not often an ended series restarts, but as we saw with “The X-Files” it can happen.
I’m guessing his library pointers are something like this:
/Media/TV Shows/Ended ← One pointer here
/Media/TV Shows/Continuing ← Another pointer here
Then as media gets moved back and forth, the system sees the files have moved, but the Watched Status and metadata doesn’t need to change or be updated. The same library contains both folders, so once it’s matched the media the “work” on PMS is done. Doing something like this for 2 different libraries shouldn’t be much different. You just need to make sure the show matches correctly after they are moved, and the watched status should move with it.
Although I’m just guessing, based on seeing how his library and folder structure is laid out. I don’t have access to his PMS library settings to verify this guess. I’ve actually thought about doing this as well, but at this point it would take a lot of work I don’t want to mess with… 
Yeah all I had to do was match the finished tv shows' again, and run an update on myongoing’ tv shows library to remove the ones that I moved to a different library.
The other thing I did was to untick `show in on deck’ on the finished library.
@MikeG6.5 said:
@WilhelmStroker said:
I did something slightly similar by moving a number of tv shows to a `finished tv show library’, which worked really well. All my watch statuses and other information were kept.I believe @cayars does something like this as well. His TV shows library points to both the continuing and ended folders and then the series folders can get moved back and forth as needed. It’s not often an ended series restarts, but as we saw with “The X-Files” it can happen.
I’m guessing his library pointers are something like this:
/Media/TV Shows/Ended ← One pointer here
/Media/TV Shows/Continuing ← Another pointer hereThen as media gets moved back and forth, the system sees the files have moved, but the Watched Status and metadata doesn’t need to change or be updated. The same library contains both folders, so once it’s matched the media the “work” on PMS is done. Doing something like this for 2 different libraries shouldn’t be much different. You just need to make sure the show matches correctly after they are moved, and the watched status should move with it.
Although I’m just guessing, based on seeing how his library and folder structure is laid out. I don’t have access to his PMS library settings to verify this guess. I’ve actually thought about doing this as well, but at this point it would take a lot of work I don’t want to mess with…
Yep I use “Ended” and “Ongoing” as my directory entries off \TV Shows.
My TV show library has and entry for both:
\TV Shows\Ended
\TV Shows\Ongoing
I did this exactly like you said. Also once the show is ended and I have all episodes I don’t need to look at them at all again by hand or with a program that fetches new episodes automatically. It just saves processing power and makes tracking easier IMHO.
I’ve not experienced any problems doing this. If I move a show from ongoing to ended I force a scan. After this each of those episodes will have 2 pointers to a file location. I then “empty trash” and it removes the old location leaving only the pointer to ended.
I’ve not had to move a series from ended to ongoing but it would work the same way.
Carlo
Early 2021 clean-up: duplicate
