I upgrade my hardware fairly frequently and am always faced with the daunting task of moving my Plex library to a new server while keeping the metadata, playlists, etc intact. Following the guides does allow me to do this, however, it is cumbersome and doesn’t always work. The last migration left me with certain video files that I could not dissociate an incorrect match no matter how many times I took it away, re-added the video while emptying trash, and re-scanning. Some large 4K video files that were migrated don’t even let me change the “watched” status. These are just a few of the issues I have encountered while migrating Plex from one system to another. The bottom line is, I would like an option to do this automatically if the Plex app can detect the new machine is running with the latest version of Plex installed. In my fantasy Plex app, I would have the option in the server menu to migrate. That migration should give me the choice of moving the media files for me or, check to see if the files are already there.
I have been wanting to rebuild my Windows 7 based media center PC (where my plex server runs) for more than a year, but have not wanted to deal with the process of migrating plex, so I keep kicking the can down the road. 
I believe that the meta data from the server stays with the file on your existing computer. So if you build a new machine or something. You should be good.
I’m right in the middle of migrating now and came here for this reason - I don’t mind having to re-scan the library (the paths will be different now anyway, so there isn’t going to be a way around that) and I don’t mind having to pull the data from the agents again, but I am having a hard time retaining my watched status - I have years and years of history I want to keep.
My server has begun to fail, and I have been very very lucky that I have been able to attempt a pull of the settings, but it’s way more than I need (it’s been copying for over an hour now for a .gz file, and I am worried the machine could fail at any moment. I don’t really need all 7gb do I?).
I really think we need a backup feature to store this to another machine (cloud storage?) and the ability to import without all this file-copying. It’s a recipe for breaking everything.
And I know I’ll need to do it again when my new server arrives 
+1 to this. I’m in the process of trying to migrate my Plex Media Server onto a new HDD on the same machine. Luckily I still have access to the old HDD and can boot into it if needed, but I’ve been unable to copy over the Registry settings and such. I mainly care about having the server registry settings copy over, including users I’ve added/shared my library with and which folders they have access to.
Is there an updated guide somewhere? I’m following the one I found here: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201370363-Move-an-Install-to-Another-System but exporting the Registry entries from the Source and trying to apply them to Destination isn’t actually working. Going to keep trying and submit a Support request if I still can’t get it, but it would be great if there were some officially supported way to do this from Plex itself.
I really like this idea (and liked the original post to make it count!) 
When I rebuilt my 1st Plex on an actual headless Linux server, I considered it’s fine to lose some data and manually fix some stuff. Since there’s more and more content which isn’t reflected on the file system (e.g. the newly introduced inline collections with their descriptions, posters, backdrops…), I feel this is getting more urgent.
I’d really appreciate some extra steps during server setup (e.g. comparable to macOS’ Migration Assistant).
#Step 1: Installation is complete - do you want to setup this server from scratch or transfer from an existing server?
Server Selection / Data Exposure
Not exactly sure how to expose all the source data without turning this into a security disaster. Approach could be to pick from your registered servers (which Plex knows) and send a “migration request” which has to be confirmed locally on the source server (“XYZ wants to create a copy of this server from . This will expose raw Plex content to that computer for the period of the transfer – please confirm”).
Content selection (optionally)
there could be an option to pick which libraries to transfer
#Step 2: Media transfer
Considering that many have their media on external drives or on a NAS, I don’t think the migration assistant should actually transfer the media files (there’s already tons of GB from cached / offline content which will take some time to transfer… don’t get into moving TB of movies – at least not by default).
Instead… give a hint to proceed after the media files are transferred / re-linked from the target system.
#Step 3: Confirm/Fix the root paths/folders of the transferred libraries
With all preparations complete, ask the admin to confirm the root folder paths for each folder linked to the transferred libraries. This should help re-connecting the library and its files. There should probably be some rough check/diagnosis if the new base folder contains the next level of subfolders as documented in the library to avoid huge confusion afterwards (“Thanks, those folders appear to match with your library” vs. “It seems something is wrong - the folder you chose does not contain the files contained in your library.”).
In the end there’s “just a little magic” needed to e.g. transfer Linux/Mac paths to Windows drive letters or vice versa
Bit of a thread necro, but this is the newest feature request thread I can find on this subject.
My PMS was originally runnng on a Win 10 box and was subsequently moved to a Synology NAS and now a FreeNAS box. Each time I’ve done this I’ve followed the instructions here and they have failed to work, so I’ve had to repopulate the metadata, planned recordings, watch history etc. by hand after the fact. With the FreeNAS system, the act of copying the existing data over the default on the new system has actually prevented the system from running at all.
I’d love to see some official tools to manage migration between different OSes. My suggestion would be to be able to specify master and slave servers, then synchronise their databases and settings. If the two systems aren’t running the same release of PMS (e.g. because the current FreeNAS plugin is a few releases old), then a warning would be necessary over lost or missing settings, but once the synchronisation was complete, the old server could be turned off and the new server used in its place.
I’d like this as well
Yes.
I am rebuilding my Playlists right now, I only have 614 albums/songs and it is taking me weeks. I know in the next year I am going to be moving my Plex Media Server to a new computer and will have to do this all over.
We need a built in solution! I am fortunate in that I really only use Plex for my music but can imagine for people who use it for everything.
In the meantime somebody sneaked in a duplicate suggestion that has however made some extra votes (compared to this one).
I suggest to close this thread for participants to comment/vote in the newer suggestion instead – this way, all votes will be behind the suggestion and not being distracted/dispersed.
Early 2021 clean-up: duplicate
