Server Version#: 1.40.4.8679
Player Version#:
<If providing server logs please do NOT turn on verbose logging, only debug logging should be enabled>
MacOS 13
I know there’s info out here, and I’ve used it before a LOOOONG time ago to do this once, but I’m trying to avoid the mistakes I made then and keep the changes, adjust symlinks as needed etc and am getting bogged down and overwhelmed keeping it all straight.
Once upon a time I migrated my libraries over to a Drobo to live in its forever home because I could just keep swapping bigger and bigger drives over time. Well…that idea aged horribly. I’ve already had to buy a used Drobo due to permanent failure. For those that don’t know they are out of business since covid etc etc.
What I’m trying to accomplish now is to move everything to a new hardware RAID setup (glyph studio). The DROBO data including Plex libraries have all been copied to the raid volume and are in a perfect mirror currently. Backup finished last night,. The raid won’t be renamed to Drobo because I’m keeping the Drobo on as dual redundancy backup of the raid1.
My question is how do I repoint the current Plex server library external drive locations to the new location without losing metadata (date added order, play counts, ratings, etc) basically make the changes without Plex looking like anything happened?
(I made those mistakes last time and it was a HUGE PITA and couldn’t be fixed so I moved on and DONT want to go through that again. Especially since its been many TB since doing so lol)
My symlink to external volume seems to be “~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server” which I’m pretty sure will have to be redone
“/Users/Nanu/Library/Caches/PlexMediaServer” seems to be on OS drive actual.
IDK what other info to add.
With that said, I wouldn’t mind moving as much as possible to the external drive if that makes things simpler for future hardware upgrades but I am happy with the current setup.
At this point idk if I’m expecting much help from anyone. This forum seems dead. But I’ll document my progress until I solve or run out of libraries to test procedure on.
So far Ive redone the symlink to the new volume and that acted as if nothing were changed.
The next step was to start testing libraries one by one. By testing I mean adding the new volume location to a specific library’s folder list My first folder with 3 unaired movies gave me duplicates that went away after removing the old directory link from Plex. Looks good! …but no. After moving on to comedies with the same result, I realized that the deletions were not only removing the duplicates but the watched status, play counts, date added etc.
After moving on to my next smaller lib, my clusterfck library of documentaries, I say that, because its a mixed folder of documentaries that some are TV series, TV single airings and others are classified as movies so I had to do metadata myself ultimately. BUT this helped me realized along with the comedy folder that seeing duplicates is a bad sign.
With much experimentation and research I was finally able to remove duplicates showing up while working in my TV folder. It seems like the problem of getting duplicates is from media that was scanned using different (older?) scanners/agents so they don’t have the same ID tags in your library (until metadata is refreshed) and Plex won’t see them as “the same” and merge the counts/statuses etc. Once I forced the metadata refresh and it was done and the new library volume location is added again you shouldn’t see any duplicates.
For most of u I think, that will be it. Just go ahead and delete the old volume location for your lib and you done.
But one very weird problem I have now is that some episodes will show the trashcan bit saying the file is missing even though it has a correct file path and the file DO exist on the drive. Im not sure why that’s happening.
I have an idea why from a bug I experienced a while bug concerning the server not recognizing the volume anymore and having to repoint it to the volume which generated the volume name with the number “1” attached to it. So I left all those double entries. I believe something in the removal process of that old volume may have something to do with it somehow since i removed it first instead of waiting till the end since I believed it was just a ghost entry at this point and thought I could simply things by Xing it out before continuing normal procedure
