I’ve seen all the posts about moving data for the Plex Media Server, but I want to know how to move the Plex PLAYER’s data (especially downloads) to another drive, on Windows.
I’ve moved the Sync folder to a different drive and tried creating a hard folder link (mklink /J) from “%LOCALAPPDATA\Plex\Plex Media Server\Sync” to “D:\Plex\Sync” and in File Explorer, the Sync folder shows as a link and opens the folder on the D drive, with 140+GB of downloads, but when I run Plex, the Downloads tab says I have no downloads.
I don’t believe it is possible, at least not in the PLEX UI. On a test, I downloaded a song, then went delving within my user directory. Finally found the song I just downloaded in: C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Plex\Plex Media Server\Sync\1\32\ARTIST_NAME\ALBUM_NAME The identifying information in the path have been replaced with all-caps text, obviously
Armed with this info, I’ll bet that the Downloads are hard-coded to save to wherever the Plex Player’s local app data is at. Unless you link that folder to be elsewhere, I doubt you can do anything about where this is saved.
It’s not a registry setting either, I found all their settings in Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\plex.tv\Plex\QQControlsFileDialog
And none of the keys here look like anything doable.
Edit: and as I type this, you already tried linking. Hmm.
Thanks for the reply. Yeah I’m really surprised this isn’t a feature. I’m guessing from the number of other posts I’ve seen, lots of other people would need the flexibility of downloading media to a specific location.
Can the whole Plex (again, PLAYER) installation be moved at all?
Sounds interesting. I think I would like to see a “mobile” install of Plex where everything about the player is self-contained and can be relocated (including downloads and user credentials). But Plex itself is fairly complex, I doubt we’ll see that happen.
OK, I decided to grab the Windows installer for Plex again and told it to install itself on the D: drive.
Only after doing this did I realise that the Plex program would probably still save downloads to %LOCALAPPDATA% and not simply reference the root drive of its installation (or a subfolder of its new location).
In the process of installing Plex a second time, I renamed the D:\Plex folder I’d created to D:\PlexData.
This broke the original hard-folder link I’d created (see my original post), as the destination folder had moved.
Interestingly, when I ran the D-drive install of Plex, and tried downloading a small file, it displayed an error message to the effect of “No permission to write to destination folder”… which was weird… so was it actually looking at the hard link but not finding the folder? Must’ve been, right?
I think what I did next was delete and re-create the hard link, then went back to running the C-drive install of Plex (uninstalling the D-drive version).
I then found that the 145GB of downloads I had (D:\PlexData) had vanished (not sure how, as it was in its own folder that I didn’t think I’d touched… did uninstalling the D-drive version of Plex ALSO delete the hard-linked Sync folder?)… but…
Re-running the original C-Drive version of Plex, I told it to download a large movie file again, and it’s currently downloading this to the D drive!
I’m gonna let it run and see if my eyes are deceiving me, and will report back tomorrow. Maybe this is a fever dream
Phew, how bizarre. I wouldn’t believe that an uninstall of Plex would clear out the appData location. If any of my other apps are to be believed, cleaning up after themselves after an uninstall is NOTORIOUS for… not happening.
Well, here’s to hoping it works out! (I don’t drink, so I’m raising a hamburger in victory)
(I don’t drink, so I’m raising a hamburger in victory)
