My Windows 10 server died a few weeks ago so I had to rebuild it with a new CPU and motherboard. I was already considering moving to Unraid anyway and I’ve been able to get most of the media files into an Unraid array.
I’m now struggling with getting the Plex database over. I have the old Windows system drive that I can access through Unraid to copy off the Plex metadata, but a lot of the preferences aren’t coming along with it.
From what I gather Windows stores a number of the preferences in the registry, rather than in a preferences.xml file. I’ve tried opening the NTUSER.dat file but it appears to be corrupt (regedit says it can’t open the Hive).
I have access to all the old files in the AppData folder from Windows.
Ideally I would be able to keep all of the poster art, library settings, plugins, users, etc, but at very least I would want to keep the watch history/played statuses for users.
Is there a way to get this information over to the new installation?
I was able to open up ntuser.dat with RegistryViewer and copied out the main plex IDs into a preferences.xml file (OldestPreviousVerson, MachineIdentifier, ProcessedMachineIdentifier, AnonymousMachineIdentifier) and also put in autoEmptyTrash=“0”.
I also copied over everything in the old appdata folder.
When I start up the docker container and try to access the webUI, it asks me to login with my passcode (I had one of these setup). However, when I got in no libraries show up and there aren’t even any server settings available in Plex. It just asks me to install Plex Media Server when I click on the Your Media option in the sidebar. Under Settings there is no Server section, where I was expecting to see my old server settings.
I’ve logged out and back in again and still no luck.
I used the linuxserver container. It’s almost as if the container doesn’t actually have Plex Media Server in it and instead is just accessing the plex.tv/web version.
It feels like I’m almost there, but I can’t work out what’s going on now.
Hold up. I think it was because I was accessing the server remotely.
When I access from a VM on the local network I have been able to get into all my library items and am just now updating the folder locations. This is looking good.
