How long should a Plex Server Directory Backup take?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Server Version#: 1.18.4.2171
Player Version#: 4.22.1

About how long should a Plex Server Directory backup take?

I just recently started backing up this directory. My first one was Jan 20/20 and my next one was Jan 30/20. The second one took much longer but I don’t know why. Here are my details:

                  Jan 20/20                    Jan 30/20

Files: 242,102 242,627
Size: 21.9 GB 25 GB
Time: 1 hr 30 min 13 hrs 30 min

I have Windows 10. I used Genie Backup Manager Pro. I stopped the Plex server first. I backed up the entire Plex Server Directory in the App Data directory. It included a compress option on both. I wasn’t using the computer either time. The Time includes a verification check. The verification only took 20 minutes for the first backup however it took about 5 hours for the second. I don’t know if I added anything to the database myself in the last 10 days but if I did, it was very minimal. It seems strange to me that the second one took much longer. Is this normal?

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This should make your backup job a lot easier: https://github.com/alekdavis/PlexBackup

1 Like
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you don’t really need to backup the whole plex data dir.

you only really need

  • the main plex .db
  • preferences.xml (or registry key on windows)

the metadata folder, as you may come to find out, can contain hundreds of thousands of tiny folders/files.

backing up/restoring those files can take days depending how large your library grows.

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That’s wrong. Unless you do not mind losing all of your custom posters and media info, you should be backing up these tens of thousands of little files. If your metadata can be auto-generated, then sure, it’s not a problem, but if you customized your media (e.g. if you had to fix wrong matches, etc), then you should back up all important directories.

As a side note, if you do it right, the backup (or restore) takes a few minutes (there are a lot of files/folders that you can ignore, but you really need to know what you are doing).

6

ok sure.

but if your appdata is 500+ gigs, its gonna take a while no matter what.

that said, if you can skip the chapter/video thumbs, while saving the other metadata, that will save a lot of time.

as far as fix matches, if folder/files are named properly, then this should be very minimal. (also, this should be in the database, so no fix matches should be needed)

finally, just want to say thanks for the backup/restore utility, nice work.

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