I have been forced to restore my Plex from backups several times recently (my own fault). Almost everything works, except that movies with different editions (Director’s Cut, Unrated, etc.) do not restore the poster for any of the editions. For example, after a restore, both Alien and Alien [Director’s Cut] are missing the poster, although they are still split into two movies in the main interface.
If I am doing it wrong, please advise on how to restore properly. Otherwise, would you please include the feature to do a full restore, including posters for special editions?
My default backup strategy was to use the PMS backup of the two core files (com.plexapp.plugins.library.{blobs.db,db}. When I manage to crash the server, I restore those two files. However, the article you linked seems to indicate that I should be saving and restoring more than those two files, perhaps via a cron job. Which other files or directories should be saved?
I would backup the entire Application Support directory but exclude the Cache directory. IF you are using Linux, this is typically /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Application Support unless you’ve moved it. This ensures that in case of a failure, all you have to do is restore the latest backup and everything is as before, minus some watchstates between the time of last backup and failure, and if any media has been added in this period.
My backup strategy may be overkill, but we do what I recommended above, and also have another VM on a completely different machine setup identical to the primary server. We then use lsyncd, which is Live Syncing (Mirror) Daemon to keep both servers in sync. You could just use rsync via cron to run at intervals. This ensures that even if our primary server goes down, our backup is still up and current. The downside to this is, if a database corruption happens, the dirty database will be sync’d as well so having a full backup is needed. Because of this, we also outside of both methods, have another cronjob that backs up the database.
Thanks. I have built a small script and set it to run daily that will backup the Application Support directory and remove old archives more than 7 days old. Hopefully I will never need to use the backups, but history says otherwise.
Hi, I had read the posted items. I guess I was not fully clear in my posting. The referenced topic does not, in my view, cover a full solution. I would like to see a full backup and full restore function in one application. No going to a backup location, finding some set of files, removing current files and replacing with the backup files. I did this once but the result was that the restored files took on the server name of the original backup device. When replacing a device or starting over, it is at times better to create a new Plex name as well. Go through the standard setup, let plex scan the source files and then restore the old server files. The restoration match files as it is restored (not just replace the data), but not the server name or other setup information that applies to a given server and not necessarily against the actual source files. I hate to reference other applications that have a good backup and restore solution, but review how Roon operates.
In that case, let’s specify how to expand/clarify this suggestion. Even with those gaps, it’s closely in line with what you’ve been asking for in the other thread which focused specifically on backing up posters and artwork
