Moving Plex metadata

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

Hi,

My apologies if this isn’t the place for this. Someone please tell me.

I have a QNAP tvs-h1688x that is running PMS. I have QTS (the NAS OS) and PMS installed on the system volume (a RAID 1 NVME volume). My media files are stored on a RAID 6, 2 fault HDD volume. I also run a 4GB NVME read only cache.

I’m considering moving Plex metadata and transcoding to a new SSD RAID 10 volume. It was suggested to me that this could help preserve the longevity of the NVME system drives while also speeding up Plex R/Ws.

I know such a move would have to be done via ssh and possibly a symlink for the metadata library file.

Does anyone have any experience or thoughts on this?

Thank you,

Daniel

2

You can let QTS do the move for you.
( PMS already supports doing this)

The FAQ is here:

Is this what you’re thinking of?

3

Well that’s awesome! thank you Chuck!

Follow-up what are the differences (in how plex runs and it’s stability) between doing this (migrating the entire app) and just relocating the library metadata and transcoding temps?

4

If you move just the metadata, leaving the app wherever it’s installed, you’ll have the following considerations.

Storage

  1. PMS software (code) is less than 100 MB
  2. Metadata, for a medium sized installation, 10-50 GB.
  3. The actual media itself, 4+ (?) TB

Performance:

  1. You’re talking about milliseconds (at best) when launching PMS. After it’s running, there is nothing gained. It’s already in memory

Support

  1. You’ve created a non-standard configuration. Extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to support.

  2. The automation I’ve built into the package installer won’t always apply.

  3. The other articles , FAQ, and posts where I’ve shown How-To’s won’t apply.

  4. The PlexData shared folder won’t work. It does not tolerate symlinks to metadata.

Functionality

  1. The transcoder temp directory can be moved by specifying the new location with in PMS itself ( Settings - Server - Transcoder - Show Advanced). If you move it yourself there are no guarantees. We don’t test for that.

  2. QTS is expecting the app with the data (which is why the ‘Migrate to’ function in App Center works). You’d be breaking that functionality. Future moves would be your responsibility to move correctly.

Migration time

  • On my QNAP, I have a small test library. There’s about 7 GB of metadata.
    My machine will do a HDD ↔ SSD migration in about 45 seconds.

  • When I used to have a full metadata library on the machine (about 40TB of media), it would migrate in about 2.5 minutes.

5

Awesome! Thank you for the detailed reply. this really helped!

As a follow up since you seem incredibly knowledgable…I have another post…Migrating watch status

I’m trying to give my son a separate full plex account. I’ve done that and added him to my home. Now I’m trying to merge his watch data from his old managed account before I remove it. Any thoughts on how to do that?

Thank you!

6

That’s a complex database editing task.

To make it happen,

  1. Lookup the “Managed User” ID (local user ID) he has bow
  2. Find his full “Plex User” ID (plex.tv ID) you just created
  3. Change all the references from the ManagedID → PlexID in the databases

I don’t know exactly how to do that (Database commands) but can ask Engineering if it’s possible and how to.

I’m the “Linux OS” guy here at Plex. I’ve been using and developing in Linux since the late 1990’s. My primary dutes are to support users and keep PMS running on each of our Linux-based platforms (workstations, servers, NAS appliances )

7

@DF42

8

Ok :slight_smile: thank you for the help Chuck :blush:

9

Trying this now. Webtools is having trouble accessing the user data

10

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