I run PMS on a Mac mini. I followed the official support article - disabling trash, copying PMS folder and plist, installing on new computer, closing it, replacing the PMS folder and plist from the source machine, restarting PMS.
All of my settings and library mappings are there, and I did a scan for files, but nothing is found. All of my media is on external drives - the paths, names of drives, etc. has not changed.
I’m missing something, obviously - but I can’t figure out what it is. I’d really like to not lose the play history the most; if that’s what happens, then fine - but I’m hoping there might be a way to salvage it!
I’ve tried the process three times - each time completely wiping the destination machine.
In your Mac’s System Settings, navigate to Privacy & Security → Files & Folders. Ensure that Plex Media Server has the following enabled (as appropriate for your environment):
Network Volumes
Removable Volumes
Downloads (maybe, if you ever add things directly from your Downloads folder).
Only locations which PMS has tried to access will be listed.
Thank you for the suggestion! I checked, and external volumes were allowed. I decided to just do the whole thing over again, and I finally got it to work. I’ll post what I did here in case it’s helpful to anyone else.
The official support article has a section called “Sign Out and Stop the Plex Media Server on the Destination System.” The immediate prior section references reaching the setup wizard but then ignoring it and closing it out. These two things together made me believe that after installing it, which is just dragging it into the Applications folder, I needed to at least start it and sign in, and then close out of the wizard, sign out, and stop the server. This was a little confusing because stopping the wizard and then trying to figure out how to sign out and stop the server didn’t quite make sense.
On this latest attempt, I just decided to skip those sections entirely. I dropped the application into the Applications folder, and then didn’t touch it. When I then dropped the PMS folder and the plist file into their respective locations, they were not replacing what was there, because nothing was there! I had wiped everything and not launched the application yet so they could not be created.
By skipping those steps, and waiting to actually start the application until the old data was in place in a fresh manner, versus overwriting, everything just worked!
The support article is very unclear on this topic. I’ll have to see if there’s a way to submit feedback for it to be improved.
