As a Plex Pass lifetime subscriber, I want to make sure my investment in the platform is protected.
Reading through the various backup and restore guides, it baffles my mind that advising people to copy-paste registry keys and other hidden system files is still a thing… I’m a software engineer by trade and deal with this sort of stuff on a daily basis. But I’d happily pay money not to do this sort of thing at home. I don’t want to run and maintain cron scripts to make daily backups of these scattered files to my private cloud sync accounts, and blah blah (which is what I do now).
It should be super easy to create an option to store all metadata and preferences with a library itself. This should be a set-and-forget setting within Plex, with an equally easy option to restore this at any time on any machine you re-install Plex on.
Make it a premium feature if you want to cash-grab, I don’t care, like I said, I’d happily pay for the ease-of-use and peace-of-mind, which I think is in the same boat as most people that pay for Plex. There are otherwise a thousand other options to do hackey scripted stuff for free.
I’ve used other media servers in the past that defaulted to storing metadata with the associated media, and I actually prefer the cleaner approach of just having the media file and maybe a subtitle file in the media storage location… but having the option to select your preferred method would definitely be nice.
I’d personally rather have the ability to manually back up and restore the database (preferably with the options to select watched / un-watched status, progress, added date, etc. separately).
Even better would be the ability to perform said backups on a user defined schedule, with the task scheduled by default on new installations to protect those that don’t know this is a thing
Emby allows the storage of a lot of the metadata in the storage folders alongside the media files as an option. This results in EXTREMELY cluttered media folders and they do not clean up after themselves if you change your mind.
The first time I installed Emby, two (maybe more) years ago, I chose that option because it sounded cool and after testing I decided to uninstall Emby because at the time it was two immature for my needs. After the install finished (I chose “Remove all traces”) I had to spend several hours removing all the junk Emby left behind. Since then I have not chosen that option and I have never had to clean up after testing Emby.
As long as it is an option I would not object to the idea BUT if it is in any way mandatory or a default I would strongly object.
I agree that backup/restore should be made easier BUT I do not think this is a good way to do it.
BTW: It is currently an option to place the “Plex data directory” in another directory and even on another local drive. So all that is really needed is some way to easily backup/restore the registry. The remaining data Plex can recreate pretty easily.
