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Yesterday I got my new Win 11 PC. I still have my old Win 10 PC intact with PMS on it. I want to install PMS on my new PC. I’ve read about an hour’s worth of stuff on the forum, with varying amounts of user success, so I thought I’d post ahead of time to reduce frustration.
I did read the article called “Move an Install to Another Computer”. This seems understandable however in my case, I want to change the media location. My current media is on letter N and is an external drive connected to the network. I am planning on moving my media to my new internal disk drive in my new PC which is letter D.
So what should my detailed steps be?
Should I still follow the steps in the above article even though the drive letters will be different?
Also, should I include CACHE in my data backup? I’ve heard contradictory statements. What’s the good and bad of each options?
It doesn’t have to remain with drive letter D:
You can pick whichever letter you want for any internal, or external drive, or any network file share.
If you can create an identical environment for Plex on the new PC, so that it will keep on finding its media under the same drive letter, folder path, and file names, you will have the most relaxed server moving experience.
It’s not necessarily required. It will be rebuilt automatically on the new machine.
Don’t make your backup into a zip file, or onto a FAT32 partition.
The best way is to copy the old plex data folder directly onto the new computer. (you can create a network file share for this purpose, if you can keep old and new computer running concurrently.)
When I moved my server, I then used robocopy.exe on the command line to clone the plex data folder. It has the benefit that it can resume a cloning operation and thus only copy data which have changed between source and target.
Otto is absolutely right here… If you start trying to change things during the server move, it will very likely go bad very quickly.
On the new PC, open up Disk Management and change the drive letter of new new internal storage from D: to N:
Once that is done, you should then be able to follow the forum guides and end up with a good new server.
I have moved to a new server 4 or 5 times now, and every single time I made sure that the data drive letters and media folder structure remained EXACTLY the same, and every time was a success.
I just remembered that I also use drive letter P as well in the old system for about half of my media. So it was using N and P.
I don’t know if this matters at all but my new internal drive letter is actually 2 hard drives that are mirrored for redundancy. Can this be changed to a new letter as well? I don’t want to mess up any mirror logic stuff.
I was just hoping to move my media to the new internal drive (using same directory structure), install PMS on the new PC, restore the server database data onto the new PC, and just change some drive letters for the new media location.
I just realized that I should be able to connect to my external hard drive on my network and give it the same letter that I used on my old PC and go from there.
Once I connect to it and get PMS working on the new computer, I’m going to eventually move the data to my new hard drive.
Disable the Plex setting “Empty trash automatically after every scan”
Shutdown Plex on the old PC and prevent it from starting automatically.
On the old PC, export the registry settings at location… “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Plex, Inc.\Plex Media Server“
Install Plex on the new PC into the default location.
When Plex starts on the new PC, shut it down. There is no need to go through the Plex initial setup steps.
Import the registry settings into the new PC.
Copy all of the content of the Plex data folder to the new PC, overwriting what is already there… (C:\Users\ WheverYourUserNameIs \AppData\Local\Plex Media Server)
Copy your media content (movies, shows, music, photos etc) to the new PC, ensuring that the folder structure is EXACTLY the same as the old PC.
Finally, launch Plex on the new PC and it pretty much should fire up and be exactly as you left it.
As long as everything appears to be OK, re-enable the Plex setting “Empty trash automatically after every scan”
The portable drive I would like to use to backup the PMS data and the Registry is exFat. Is that okay? I started to backup to the network, but it’s slow and stopped twice. I’m in the basement using a powerline network adapter, so it’s not ideal.
Poster selections are stored as symbolic links. I’m not sure if exFat has support for these.
You might want to reformat the HDD to NTFS, before starting the copy process.
I completed the first 4 steps. At the end of the installation, there was a checkbox that said “start” Plex, but I took the checkmark away and the installation just finished and that was it. Was that okay or do I actually have to start Plex? I’m wondering because step 7 says to overwrite what is already there and I checked and there is currently nothing in the AppData area. Maybe I stopped the process too soon?
Not starting a freshly installed server will deprive you of two things:
you won’t be able to confirm the location of the Plex data folder, because it hasn’t been created yet
you won’t be able to confirm the server principally working, before you restore your backed up data. I’d go through the initial setup and create a small test library, before restoring all the old server data.
I did it that way because step 5 said “when Plex starts on the new PC, shut it down…” but I think I need to run it so that it can do the things you mentioned. thanks.
I started PMS and then logged out and shut it down. Did the restore of the plex data and the windows registry. Both of those had the default file structure this time so I just replaced them. Crossed my fingers. Restarted PMS and accessed Plex via web and signed in. Voila. Just like on my old system. Stress gone. I’m eventually going to move my media onto my internal drives but baby steps. As you suggested, it was better to restore like the old system and then I can make my media changes. thanks so much to all who helped me.
