Sign Out and Stop the Plex Media Server on the Destination System
Does this mean, Sign Out from my current active PMS in the old box? If so, what happens to the authorized devices?
Copy Server Data From the Source System
When I copy the server data from the old system to the new, do I need to reset permissions or/and take ownership of the data files? The account name is the same but there will be a small difference: OLDSERVER\Yaracuy and NEWSERVER\Yaracuy
Edit Your Libraries
All my libraries are in a Syno NAS, so the paths won’t be changed. Do I need to take some further action?
depends on how you are copying. If you use robocopy /MIR (which I recommend), then you are copying the access permissions from the old to the new system. Since your new Windows machine is probably a fresh installation and not a mirrored copy of your old Windows, your username (even though it is the same as on the old machine) has a different user ID number. Which means you indeed have to adapt the user access permissions of the copied Plex data folder.
Don’t forget to copy the registry data! Otherwise you will have to reset all your clients and your shared users won’t have access to the new server either.
There is no need to edit the libraries if your media files are going to be available under the same addres/drive letter/path name/filenames as on the old server.
In fact this method is very much recommended. It is easy to change the drive letters on Windows, so do take notes about which drive had which drive letter on the old server.
import the the old server’s registry settings completely, if you want the new machine to take over the place of the old machine. If you however want the new machine to work side-by-side and concurrently with the old server, you need to erase these three registry values.
The registry data is OK. I’ve already exported it and edited the couple of paths which will be different - Plex data folder, Plex databases backup folder and Transcode folder
I think I have everything in place for tomorrow: Moving day
Don’t. You will lose all poster selections and everything will revert to the defaults.
Invest the time and do a file copy with robocopy.
Another tip: before firing up plex server on the new machine, I’d swap the local IP addresses of old and new server.
The server should have a static local IP anyway.
Didn’t know that. Thanks for the tip. I’ll checkout on robocopy.
About the IP address, it’s taken care of. All my PCs at home have a static IP address. The new PC has a temporary IP address which I will swap with the current PMS box IP address when it goes live.
The migration went really smooth. PMS is already running on the new system. Logs look fine and every client connecting as usual. Looks like nothing changed
Thanks for the tip on robocopy. It’s extremely fast and reliable and it surely beats zipping, copying the zip over and unzipping.
This is actually how I “moved” my AppData content… Zipped it up uncompressed with 7zip, copied the file to the new server, extracted and moved it into position.
Didn’t lose a single bean!
I know there are a million and 1 ways to get from A to Z, but I just cannot fathom how zipping up a location and extracting it somewhere else could possibly make Plex so upset that it would choke on its own posters.
As long as all content and metadata is in exactly the same location and all appropriate permissions have been applied, there should never be a problem.
It’s not the posters, but the selection among them which to actually use. If you never selected one poster version over another manually, you will not perceive much change after a server transfer.
However, if you did pick posters a lot, these selections will revert to the default poster motive.
The reason is that these selections are “stored” as a symbolic link. ZIP cannot transfer this kind of thing. (on Linux, the TAR format however can)
I do this all the time… In fact I often make my own custom posters so that I can colour and contrast correct in order to make it look better, and then I often add my own tiny little signature in the bottom right so that I know that the poster selected is the one I made.
I have checked over a whole host of items that I know I customised and everything is still there and still selected.
A path is a path… If the path has changed then I can see how stuff can get broken, but my paths were identical on both old and new servers.
That is a different story. Because then you put it as a file beside the media file(s). If you then also have activated “Use local assets”, these sidecar graphic files will get chosen by default anyway.
That depends on the circumstances and the type of storage (local, networked etc.)
But the best thing about using robocopy with the /MIR parameter is that you can abort the operation anytime (Ctrl+C) and then later simply repeat the command and it will compare source and target and then will only copy the files which are not already present in the target location.
Well, I honestly don’t know what to say about this!..
I am meticulous about my poster art, and in fact here is an example of 2 custom posters that don’t exist beside the file, and yet they are still there in Plex, selected…
Personally, I don’t choose posters in the Plex Web UI. Used to do it but not anymore.
If there is a poster or background I want, I download it from TMDB or TheTVDB and put them in the same folder as the movie or TV Show (also season posters). Same with movies or TV Shows music themes. For me it’s a better solution.
Haven’t found a way to do the same with collections though.
