Everything comes up perfectly (with Added Dated and Watched status intact) on the new server except for about 50 movies. These movies show up both in the Recently Added list and as Unwatched for all users. However these are old movies that have been watched.
From reading I’ve gathered this is likely this because its likely that the movies were not properly matched originally.
So my question is: what can I do to properly match these movies on my old server so that when I move the library to the new server (maintaining added date and watched status)?
Thanks for any insights you might have!
(My Plex is up-to-date, I’m running on Windows (no Dockers or VMs)
In short: nothing.
If you rename these files so they follow Plex’s required naming schema, chances are big they will be marked as ‘newly added’ - even on the old server.
If you created a copy of these files, renamed them properly and added them to the old box, they will probably be recognised as the right movie, but won’t inherit the watched status and ‘added at’ date from their misnamed counterparts.
Either way, as soon as you have ‘unmatched’ items, you will get major trouble when moving servers.
The only chance would be to edit the database directly:
First of all thank you OttoKerner for your help and insight. It was useful.
I ended up deciding to fix the root problem (the file structure and naming of the movies) and forgo the watched status to fix the problem in the future. Once this was done, I contemplated the DB script mentioned but deciding it was going to be too messy with the preferred Plex folder structure change (all my movies were in a flat list before).
I did find a work around for the watched status of unmatched movies that have been moved however it can only be done one movie at a time:
In the Plex Web client click the edit icon for a movie that is mismatched but was matched in a previous location.
Cancel the edit box (the reason for this? For some reason in the most recent version of Plex the Match / Fix Match option is not shown when you first click the menu icon for a movie and this is a work around).
Click the menu icon for that movie and select Match / Fix Match
Select the Search Options tab
For Agent select Plex Movie
Run the search, for me at least the first result was always the correct one
Once this is done the movie appears to update its location while maintaining its Watched status. However this is really really slow for a larger collection of mismatches.
Hope this is helpful to others.
This feels like an area where Plex could do a better job of supporting users who are upgrading and moving media. Seems like a fairly common task that is current too difficult to do.
