Hi team
I am many versions behind… and when using the player on my PC - see the server install updates available. I can download that file… but struggle to get it to work on my truenas / plex server.
When I try to upgrade/update from Truenas (jail / plugin upgrade) it does its thing… but it always seems to fail… says no update essentially. Although its been many many months.
The plugins are kinda depreciated is what I have been hearing. So it would be better to set up Plex in a plain jail so you’re not dependent on the (in)frequency of the updates to the plugin.
Not sure what I’m going to do about syncthing when they stop that plugin. The setup and web interface seem to more complicated, like there is an internal reverse proxy as part of it somewhere.
Upgrading from 12.0 to 13.0 is fairly easy. Just change the train, the system should download & install the upgrades automatically. If for some reason something doesn’t work and you want to “roll back” to 12.0, just go to System>Boot and select a previous version to boot to and then reboot.
A NAS isn’t a backup strategy. If you’re worried about losing your data, you need to back it up properly.
As far as the upgrade goes, do NOT upgrade the storage pools to the new feature levels right after you do the upgrade. You will lose the ability to mount the pools in the previous version if you need to go back to your old boot environment for some reason.
Personally I only upgrade the pools right before a major update, as I know the (current) system works and I maintain compatibility with that after I’ve upgraded to the new system.
Upgrading jails between major TrueNAS releases has never worked out for me, though. I’ve just gotten used to needing to remake my jails anew and transfer app configs over. My moving Plex to a new jail is pretty easy if I have all the mount points the same.
I shouldn’t think so… just do one thing at a time. The plugins/jails are self contained and no data should be lost. Plex should come up right after booting just as it does now.
Depends on what you are worried about losing. if you mean your media files, the most important thing is that the copy on your TrueNAS system should not be your only copy of them. While it’s unlikely a TrueNAS upgrade will cause a loss of all that data, it’s still possible something will happen that causes you to lose a pool.
Ideally you would want to follow the 3-2-1 rule. Three copies of the data: Two locally (so, your NAS and maybe another copy on another PC or backup drive) and one more off-site. I have my files divided up between a couple high-capacity external hard drives kept elsewhere for my “one”. And occasionally I retrieve those drives and using a file sync program with file verification to update the backup for things I have added or removed from my original copies.
If you mean just your Plex data (libraries, playlists, collections, watch history, etc), you can make a TAR archive of all that, and then copy just that archive somewhere else. That way if you had to remake your Plex system you could just make sure the mount points are all exactly the same and copy the data back to a fresh install essentially. This folder is /usr/local/plexdata-plexpass if you’re using a plain jail install. I believe it’s located someplace slightly different if you’re using the plugin. You want to stop the server process first, and then you can create an archive of the folder by going to the /usr/local directory and running this command:
tar -cvf plexdata-plexpass.tar plexdata-plexpass
This may take several minutes depending on the size of your libraries. Copy the new archive somewhere else (like off your server ideally). Don’t try to just copy the folder as it is to back it up. It will take forever because of the thousands of directory entries it will need to write for all the files themselves. The archive will be small enough to fit on a flash drive (mine’s about 23 GB).
If you mean your media files (the movies and shows), plug the hard drive into your normal PC (I assume you added the files to your NAS via a SMB share or something like that). So you can just copy them off the NAS from the share to your external hard drive that way. I use the free version of TeraCopy to make sure things get copied without errors.
To copy them direct off TrueNAS you would have to mount the external drive within TrueNAS and then copy them from the shell, and then find a way to verify them too to make sure there weren’t any corruptions in all that data. Just doing it from Windows seems easier here. You can start a large batch of files at night before you turn in so the network usage is while you are sleeping. But I never really had issues with doing other things while a copy was going on myself.
Thanks gents. Copying and updating via teracopy, slowly but surely.
Updated train.
I had to re-do VPN wireguard plugin etc, after jails updated etc.
Wondering what update train to get on - for Scale… and how that might mess stuff up.
If you don’t have something specific you want to do that really needs SCALE, I wouldn’t. Kubernates adds a lot of overhead to the system operation I hear, and you have the deal with dataset permissions access to the containers then. I don’t have a system that supports hardware acceleration for Plex transcoding, and I’m not hung up enough on the Sonic Analysis feature to change my entire platform to get it.
I keep an Ubuntu Server virtual machine running just to keep tabs on Jellyfin’s development (you can run it on TrueNAS directly in a jail, but the setup is a bit complicated and it’s not easy to update when a new version comes out).
New ZFS version or feature flags are available for pool(s) HDD_2x12TB. Upgrading pools is a one-time process that can prevent rolling the system back to an earlier TrueNAS version. It is recommended to read the TrueNAS release notes and confirm you need the new ZFS feature flags before upgrading a pool.
