I bought a new drive and successfully migrated Plex to it.
Now I want to move my media on to it as well to free up space on my current/old drive.
I followed these instructions in this support article but unfortunately it hasn’t worked.
The media is still being read from its original location on the old drive!
So I obviously can’t erase it or Plex will stop working so…how do I solve this?
I tried restarting Plex and even the NAS, to no avail.
Thanks in advance,
Chumbo
Make sure to follow the complete instructions. When the new drive is added and recognized, all your movies should be listed with 2 versions. Final step will be to remove the original path from the library.
Oh?
Maybe the instructions would merit a clearer explanation then because I only went through the first section titled:
" Upgrading a Hard Drive - If you’re simply upgrading to a new/larger hard drive, the easiest thing to do is to name the new location exactly the same as the original one."
This pretty matched exactly what my situation was so I went no further when at the bottom of the instructions it stated:
“If you’ve done things correctly, your server won’t even know that anything has changed and your content will work right away.”
So now I’m confused. Since I already did those steps under the section"Upgrading a Hard Drive"…where do I go from here?
In the other section “Moving Content to a New Location” it states I should first start with disabling ‘Empty trash automatically after every scan’ which I of course didn’t do since not part of the other instructions.
And to answer your comment, no I don’t have duplicates of my media. There is only one version of everything and it all points to the old drive.
So where do I go from here then? Plex is pretty fragile and things can get messed up pretty quickly so please advise.
(BTW, I presume all my personalized settings will be there like my Plalists, Watched list, etc…right? Everything will be as before, correct?)
Note that those instructions specifically say to, “[make] sure the new hard drive is named exactly the same as the old one.” Since you also say that, “The media is still being read from its original location on the old drive!” that indicates you didn’t upgrade the drive, but added a new drive in addition to the old one, or didn’t rename the new drive to match the name of your old drive. In that case, you want to follow the more complex steps outlined in “Moving Content to a New Location.”
I did EXACTLY everything that was written in that ‘Upgrading a Hard Drive’ so yes, I did name the new drive exactly as the original and yet, I can promise you that it is being read from the old location which has now been renamed to something different.
However, the old drive is still present and I intend to keep it there but just delete the media content once I’m sure that Plex is in fact reading off the new drive.
I just want to point out that the old drive needs to be present in order to do what is explained in step 4:
" 1. Copy the content from the old drive to the new drive, making sure that the content ends up in the same relative location"
And yes, everything is in the same relative location (if I didn’t know I changed drives, I wouldn’t know it by looking at it in File Station or Windows Explorer because it’s all identical to how it was on the old drive (except for files & folders that Plex didn’t have access to).
How exactly are you verifying that? If you didn’t change any paths in Plex (Manage Library > Edit > Add folders), then when you go to any item in your library and use Get Info to look at the file path, it’s the same as it was before you upgraded the drive, correct? And so if your new drive has also been renamed to match that exact path, I don’t see how it could still be reading data from that old drive.
I just wonder if these instructions aren’t outdated on how Plex maybe now reads the source of the libraries?
If I look at the source of a folder like the one I have for movies, this is the current path Plex is reading from: “/share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/MyVideos/Movies”
Nowhere do you see the name of the drive in there? (in File Station, it’s named ‘DataVol1’ so it seems to make sense that renaming it would have no effect…right?
(FYI, MyVideos/Movies are both folders in the drive DataVol1 or what Plex reads as CACHEDEV1_DATA)
DTR, we posted at the same time but actually my previous post is a relevant answer to your question because when I look at the Get Info, it in fact shows the drive as being CACHEDEV1_DATA so I think this is the issue…but I still don’t know how to resolve this
I first noticed this by renaming a movie and then try to read it from Plex. When I renamed it on the newer drive, it had no effect, I could watch the movie.
When I renamed it on the original drive, it was no longer readable in Plex.
Ah, I’m unfamiliar with QNAP devices, but my guess is that “DataVol1” is an alias opposed than the actual name of the drive (like in Windows, I can name the D: drive “Data”, but it will still be referred to as D: under the hood). I unfortunately don’t think I can offer much advice on changing the “real” name of the new drive to make the upgrade process more seamless, but another possibility would be to find that “real” name of your new drive and follow the more complicated “Moving Content to a New Location” instructions.
Yes, I guess that’s just what I might have to do. I just was hoping to hear from a Plex Employee about the important question of whether or not I’ll loose my Playlists, Watched/Unwatched lists, etc…
