Mac Pro Upgrade to Mojave - Restored back to High Sierra and Plex Media Server not starting

Plex Players Desktop Players
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Server Version#: Plex Pass version 1.13.9
Player Version#: N/A

Comfortable that I have TimeMachine backups I upgraded my reliable Mac Pro with Mojave. But alas, my graphics card was not supported even though research indicated the NVIDIA card would work. So I restored back to High Sierra.

All appeared to work but the PMS icon was not in the top line. Looked for logs in the ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server directory but a dump file would appear momentarily and then disappear.

Researched the Plex forum thinking everyone will have suffered this situation after a restore but no clues.

I finally found a hint to the best approach to take when logs are not produced and in my case, a dump file disappears…

  1. Use Terminal to run the PMS.
  • this produces output to the terminal screen bypassing the need to look at the log
  1. Fix the problem reported when PMS crashes
  • my Logs folder was owned by root with no permission for the user to create a log, subsequently crashing PMS

I hope the above helps anyone using TimeMachine to restore their system only to find that their beautiful Plex Media Server will not start. It is such a basic issue yet if you do not have an approach to take, you cannot provide dumps or logs to Plex to review and so you will sit their stumped for days. Took be 2 days to work this out yet so simple in the end - a permissions issue.

And my last comment, doesn’t Apple Time Machine piss you off when it cannot restore permissions correctly. Well that is what happened to me.

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Thanks for the feedback. A common problem many users encountered it - and this old long forum thread has a number of such reports Media server stuck on "Starting"?

Use of terminal is the way to find these start up issues

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