I’m a fairly experienced user (10+ years) who has moved between windows machines in the past. I’m currently moving 29TB of media from 3 external windows drives to a 55TB unraid array. So, I am now faced with the question of how to run the Plex Server.
Option 1: Use a docker container in Plex. If I were new to Plex this is what I would do - but I am VERY concerned about losing my metadata.
Option 2: Run the plex server in a windows vm. I already have win 11 up and running and the host machine is VERY powerful (27 cores) so I have more than enough power to do this. Of course, I am copying the files into folders that duplicate the original structure of each drive. This would enable me to map drive letters so the would match those on my current machine. In theory, this should basically appear to the server as if nothing has changed, BTW, the VM is running off of an SSD and has 6 performance cores assigned to it.
After reading some of the posts here, I’m seriously considering the 2nd option. Your thoughts?
OK, I do have it running on the unraid server - however, as I feared I was unable to get the metadata transferred to a Docker container. I lost ALL my custom corrections and descriptions. So, I went with plan “B”…
I had already installed Win 11 as a VM…
I mapped network drives to each folder where files from the external drives had been copied, matching original drive letters
I installed Plex on the Win 11 VM
After making sure that Plex was not running, I deleted the Plex directory and replaced it with the Plex directory from the source machine.
(When I did not do this in a previous attempt, the process failed)
I deleted the Plex metadata directory and replaced it with the Plex metadata directory from the source machine
On the source machine, I exported the Plex registry settings
On the Win 11 VM, I imported the registry settings
Just to make sure, I rebooted the VM
At that point I had a functional Plex install with 100% of my metadata. I hope this helps someone.
