Server Version#: 1.24.4.5081
Player Version#: 4.66.1
Here’s a quick rundown of my setup. I have PMS running on an Intel NUC on Ubuntu. All my media resides (or, resided rather) on a Synology NAS. We’ll call this NAS A for the purposes of what I’m describing. Everything is running on wired gigabit Ethernet using CAT6 cables all going through a D-Link managed switch. Both NAS units (you’ll see why I have 2 below) are link aggregated with all 4 gigabit ports on each unit trunked, occupying 8 of the 16 ports on my switch.
So… NAS A started running out of space and I had a few extra hard drives lying around I had bought as spares when WD had a sale a while back. Since I was out of bays and didn’t want to buy bigger hard drives, I decided to buy a second Synology unit, we’ll now call this NAS B.
I decided I was going to split up all my media. Movies and TV shows were all going to get migrated over to NAS B, while NAS A was going to continue housing pron (yes people, it’s the Internet, there’s adult content out there, get over it). I used Synology’s Hyper Backup to do a sync of my Movie and TV library folders from NAS A over to NAS B. Then I did a restore of all the video files and when all was said and done, I had identical folders for both Movies & TV. The backup and restore process took about 8 days total as it’s close to 19TB of data.
In Plex Web, I started with my TV library and went into Manage Library->Edit->Add folders and then browsed to the TV folder in NAS B. But I left the TV folder for NAS A in place as this is the described process in the documentation. When I saved the new folder, it went to scan everything. After about 30 minutes or so, my library looked exactly as it did before, which is what I expected. After spot checking a few things to confirm things looked good (including randomly playing some shows), I went back into the edit screen and removed the TV folder for NAS A. After saving, it scanned yet again and after another 30 minutes or so, everything still looked exactly the way it was except for a bunch of red trash can icons indicating missing media (totally expected). So, emptying the trash brought the library to the exact state that it was before. All the metadata I customized seems to be there. Posters (show and season) were all the same. Played status all the same. Etc. Success!!!
So, why am I posting this message?
Well, I repeated the exact procedure above for my Movies folder. But when I added the path in NAS B and let it scan, it added all those movies as if they were brand new to me. So it was essentially duplicating everything in the library. Instead of 2000+ movies in the library, I had 4000+ movies, a double copy of everything! On top of this, the scan took something like 2-3 hours (I lost track of how long). That didn’t seem right, so I deleted the path to NAS B, restoring the original configuration. After letting it scan and then emptying the trash, things were back exactly as they were before. So maybe it was a glitch? Well, I just tried it again earlier today and the same thing happened. All my movies were duplicated upon adding the new path. Some spot checking showed that everything which should have been preserved (posters, tag lines, plot descriptions, played status), everything I’ve painstakingly customized over the past 9 years was still okay for media files pointing to NAS A. But all the media on NAS B was added as if it were brand new to me.
Okay, if you’ve invested enough time to read through my long-winded explanation of what happened, I’m hoping you’re invested enough to have a good suggestion to migrate my Movie library path and have the same success as I did with my TV library. Because for the life of me, I can’t figure out why it worked like a peach for TV shows, but completely borked for Movies.
