I have two independent Plex Media Servers running in two Synology NAS placed in different locations for local use as well as for backup purposes. The two NAS sync with each other the actual media content rather than the PMS folders themselves.
I have a bunch of collections on the first NAS in which I’ve spent years and countless effort and would like to back them up to the second NAS so they can be accessed from both servers and for backup purposes as well. Other than that, both PMS servers behave the same way since the media folders available to them are identical in structure.
As much as I’ve tried I haven’t been able to locate a folder under the PlexMediaServer folder containing the data for collections. After searching through the forums all I’ve found is a mention along the lines of “libraries are made up of actual files. Playlists and collections just point to those files programatically.”
In the event of a catastrophe I can have Plex rebuild everything just by just providing the media, but is there anyway to save the data containing the pointers in the collections so I don’t lose years and years of precious manually curated data? Other than having to backup the actual PMS folder (which in my case contains the ridiculous amount of 150k files)?
Backing up the actual PMS folder will be needed if you want to preserve the generated/downloaded metadata such as posters, thumbnails, etc.
I believe info on what movies are in what collection is stored in the database itself, which is (I think?) a SQLite file which you could back up yourself often. In fact, the server already backs up this database file often in case of corruption, so you could find the backup and preserve it yourself. Upon rebuilding a server, you could then restore this backup and I think it would preserve collections.
Thanks for responding. Do you have any suggestion for where I could look to find this database file? I don’t see any backup folder within the PMS folder. I have this installed on a Synology NAS. Thanks!
I hope this works out. I do not know much about Plex’s inner workings, but it seems to me that the database itself (these .db files) ought to be where info on collections are saved. If anyone has any other suggestion, I am completely open to being contradicted.
