I'm migrating to a NAS .. can I keep all of my media configurations?

General Discussions
1

Up until now, I’ve had all my media on a single drive. I’m building a NAS this weekend and will need to transfer all of my content over and I may or may not keep the same folder structure. Right now everything is a bit of a mess.

I’ve spent a ton of time configuring each movie with posters that I prefer and such… can all of that information be preserved even if I move files around?

I’ve noticed in the past that if I delete SomeMovie720p.mkv, then replace it with a better quality SomeMovie1080p.mkv and do a rescan, Plex will regenerate the default metadata even though it’s technically the same movie. Not sure if it will do the same if I modify my directory structure.

I don’t know what all Plex does behind the scenes to keep track of your content to match up metadata. It would be nice if Plex would manage existing metadata using an IMDb ID or something but that doesn’t seem to be the case

2

If you’re migrating from a Linux-based system to a Linux-based NAS (which most are), the migration is quite painless. You do need to pay attention to the details (procedure) and will need to manually place your data (metadata/database) where it is on the NAS.

The support article you need to read and study is here: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201370363-Move-an-Install-to-Another-System

3

Thanks, I’ll bookmark that. Yes it’s linux to linux

My question was slightly different though (I was not descriptive enough in my title). A normal migration would be something like:

[old root]\Movies\Subcategory\Movie.mkv … to:
[new root]\Movies\Subcategory\Movie.mkv

But my structure may be different, like this:

[old root]\Movies\Subcategory\Movie.mkv … to:
[new root]\Movies\Movie.mkv

Will Plex be able to find the file and map it to my existing metadata or will it redownload new metadata like it does when I replace a file?

4

You need the other migration. https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201154537-Move-Media-Content-to-a-New-Location

support.plex.tv

All of these articles can be searched for really easily “Move media” is all I used.

5

Thank you. I was over-complicating it in my head … when it is really just two separate common procedures.

6

You’re very welcome. It’s easy to do.

To share what I did.

  1. Setup the nas out of the box.
  2. Configure the shares how I want them to be for Plex
  3. Add those new directories to Plex to start scanning.
  4. Copy from the computer to the NAS. As I did, each item was detected by PMS and tagged with a ‘2’ (duplicate).
  5. When everything was copied and I verified everything had the duplicate marker.
  6. One last update of the library
  7. Edit the library and remove the original folder name, leaving only the NAS reference.
  8. Delete the local copy of the media since it’s no longer used.