I upgraded and reformatted my hard drive a few days ago and I put my old hard drive in an external hard drive enclosure. I figured it would be as simple as moving the Plex Media Server folder in
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server from the old drive to the new drive and all the stars would align and everything would be perfect, obviously, I was mistaken. I looked at a few of the self-help guides to moving the plex media server to a new location, but I could find one specifically for moving it back to the original location. I also didn’t back up the registry key for the plex server, but the usernames for each computer are identical so would that be a problem? I hope I didn’t mess things up too much, because I have a HUGE Plex library and it would be a real pain to rebuild it all. My old drive is still in the external enclosure and I can copy anything from it to the new drive, so where should I start? Thanks!
To answer your specific question:
You can move the server data directory into the new place and Plex should be able to pick that up. However with the registry information gone you have certainly lost some critical information
So… long story short:
- let’s start this over by removing the new server and its server data folder (this is to take out whatever config changes you’ve already done from this equation)
Uninstall Plex Media Server | Plex Support - re-install Plex Media Server and run it
- open the bundled web app through your local browser and go through the setup guide — name your server, link it to your account; no need to add libraries
- stop the server
- replace the complete server data directory from your new server with the data you backed up
This will not be 100% perfect and you might need to redo some stuff but it should give you a near complete restore. Technically there’s not much of a difference between migrating your server to a new system or restoring it on the same machine after re-installing the OS.
As for the attitude (in your now self-deleted posts) — please stick with the forum rules and don’t feel offended simply because other users are asking you questions to better understand your setup / issue in order to provide some meaningful assistance. Snapping at users will not invite others to get the same treatment.
Thank you for providing help @tom80H I deleted my posts, not for being embarrassed or to hide anything, but because divideby0 and I had nothing more to say to each other, and I felt a bit embarrassed for acting like an a-hole. Sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my brain. I was a jerk for no reason to @Divideby0 and I’m sorry for that. I understand if he doesn’t want to accept my apology, but I thought I’d make it for the sake of making it. I hope you both have a good evening, better than the one I started you out with. :-\
I hope you do too (Have a good night). I accept your apology and offer my own.
Know that I was trying to help with all the best intentions, I guess I just didn’t see that anything had gone wrong. I thought that all you had done should have worked. But if you are in the forums, something happened, and I wanted to get straight to it.
SERIOUS edits, to make it less snappy (again).
Thanks for understanding, and accepting my apology, I think? 
I appreciate it.
I hate to ask yet another question, but should I remove the basic Plex App or just the Plex Media Server? Sorry…
Just the server – the app has no impact on that.
Everything’s back to normal, thanks @Divideby0 & @tom80H . An admin can close this now if they need be.
