How do I migrate hard drives without losing all my formatting and watch progress?

General Discussions
1

I’ve got a lot of versions of a lot of things that I’ve had to unmatch and such, and I’d rather not have to do that all again. I’m moving everything from two 5tb drives to one 12tb drive, all external, Windows 10.

2

Are you moving the install itself (more complex) or just the location of the media? These two things don’t have to be together (and it’s a good thing to never keep them together). For now, I’m going to assume the latter (much easier to do, and I’m leaning towards you changing the location of your media stored on those two drives).

Wherever Plex is installed, it also has a big database of what-do-I-have and who-watched-what. If this doesn’t move, and just the location of your media, then it’s pretty simple (compared to moving the server). It would be best to keep the original drives in place if possible, but if that isn’t it’s still doable.

  1. New Drive
    Insert new drive, format it how you want, then copy the media from the older drives. Organize it how you want, but still make sure that all media is separate (don’t mix TV Shows and Movies into one folder)

  2. Disable Emptying of Trash
    On your source Plex Media Server, you’ll want to disable the Empty trash automatically after every scan preference for the Server.

  3. Edit Your Libraries
    Here is where it would be good to have the old and new drives attached at once. Edit each library to point to the new location of the media on the new drive. DO NOT REMOVE THE OLD SOURCE at this time. After you edit the source, Scan Library Files if it doesn’t automatically trigger a scan.

  4. Wait for it to complete. It will hopefully detect “Duplicates” of each of your media files. When this scan completes, Edit the library again, and remove the old source. Do this for each library you have, preferably one-by-one, as Plex can only scan one library at a time.

  5. Verify your media now works in the new location. Since we did an in-place replacement, Plex should retain the “Watched” and “On Deck” info for the videos in the new location.

  6. If everything works, re-enable the Empty trash automatically after every scan preference for the Server. Empty trash manually, if you don’t want to wait.

I borrowed a few steps from the Article on moving an install to another system. Those are the steps you will likely need to do if the Plex was also installed on one of those 5TB drives.

3

That preserved the watch history, but it didn’t preserve any of my split/unmatched movie versions.

4

You cannot do what you want (change the location of the media files) without directly editing the database. [HowTo] Plex database modification - Moving media the right/wrong way - #10 by jelwell

There’s another strategy, but it requires you to keep the number of drives the same.
In short:

  • disable automatic library updates as above
  • stop Plex server
  • copy files from old to new drive, keeping folder names and file names exactly the same
  • remove old drive
  • re-assign the old-drive-letter to the new drive
  • [repeat for the second old drive]
5

It depends on how you have your media split among the two drives. If the movies that you have custom split/unmatched info are all or mostly on one drive, then do as Otto said and try to preserve the drive structure and name and letter as much as you can from that one drive. Then, put the contents of the second drive on the new drive as well. I hope that you have a logical structure, and weren’t pointing to the root of each drive as your source for a library, or otherwise you’d be unable to combine the two drives while keeping their contents separate.

6

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