Ive read a few posts similar to what I want to do but they always included an instruction of which is not relevant to my situation so Im posting anew to be sure im not misunderstanding something as I feel I am.
I have multiple drives for movies and am adding a new drive to the JBODs. The drives are arranged for instance:
Disk 1: A-F
Disk 2: G-L
etc etc…
One of the drives has more movies on it than the others so I’d like to add a new drive, rename the drives as above and redistribute the files evenly amongst all of the drives.
But I dont want to lose the Date Added or Watched List info. Each time ive moved a few it adds it to the top of the Date Added list and id like to avoid this.
Use a different strategy.
Just add the new drive and put newly arrived media on it, regardless of index letter.
Don’t move items just because they have a different index letter.
If you want to find out which of the drives has the file of a particular item, you can always look at the Plex media info.
Then think about drive pooling. It allows you to collect all drives under one drive letter. With some careful planning, your drive pool can end up under the same drive letter which your first drive is currently using.
So for Plex nothing changes, except the drive capacitiy got bigger.
Users regularly recommend https://stablebit.com/ over Windows’ Storage Spaces. Both for performance reasons as well as ease of use.
(Keep in mind that you must NOT add the drive which houses the Plex data folder to the pool.)
I found a simple solution for those wishing to do this if you have NFO files for each movie such as those created by TMM or Kodi.
Just quit Plex.
Move your files as required.
Delete your old libraries.
Create a new library and that’s it.
Your watched status and date added are stored in the NFO so they remain the same.
Plex doesn’t do that. And even if they are stored in the .nfo by another software, it doesn’t mean anything to Plex.
When you tested it that way, Plex retained the watched status because it saves it in its own database.
Which means that:
it won’t work if you lose the Plex database or the whole Plex data folder
it won’t work if you just move your media files to a new machine and set up a fresh Plex server on there
The watched status is not connected with the library, but with the guid of the media item.
The guid in turn is connected with the metadata agent which was used to “match” the file.
Which means that the above will also only work if the deleted library used the same metadata agent as the newly created library.
And it won’t work at all for media which cannot be matched, like personal media.
