Moving some, not all, content to a new drive

Server Version#: 1.17.0.1841
Player Version#:

My Plex library continues to grow. I now need to add a new drive for TV content. My current content is spread across 3 drives TV, TV2 and TV3. I need to add a drive called TV1 and move some of the content from TV and some of the content from TV2 to the new TV1 drive. This will free up space on TV and TV2 and allow me to keep thing alphabetical in the directory structure.

What I can’t seem to figure out is how do I copy the content to the new drive, remove it from the old drives and then get Plex to recognize that all content beginning with letters E-M has moved to a new location. Can I simply copy the content to the new drive, delete it from the old locations and rescan my libraries to have the file pointers update or is it more invoked than that? I’d also like to retain watched/I watched staus if that’s possible. I’ve found lots of methods for moving all content (name new drive same as old drive for example) but nothing to address a scenario like this specifically. Can anyone point me in the right direction please? Any help is appreciated and sorry if this is covered somewhere and I’m just not finding it.

The official recommendation, a bit modified:

  1. Create a folder tv shows e-m on the new drive.
  2. put a small text file into it. (it doesn’t matter what’s in it, it just needs to be not empty)
  3. Edit your library and add (not ‘replace’!) the new drive letter and folder location.
    As a safety measure, use the hosted web app https://app.plex.tv and reload (F5) the app into the web browser, immediately before editing the library.
  4. disable ‘automatic’ and ‘periodic’ library updates under Settings - Server - Library
  5. copy the intended shows from the old drive to the new one. Do not remove them from the old drive yet!
  6. ‘Scan Library Files’ of the tv shows library
  7. after it is finished, verify that all the copied shows haven’t been added as new shows (they must not appear on the plex home page as ‘recentlöy added’ ) but that merely all episodes of these shows have now a small 2 in the top-left corner of their thumbnail picture.
    Only continue with step 8) if this is true.
  8. delete the copied shows from the old drive.
    The old drive/folder must not be left completely empty!
  9. ‘Scan library Files’ again. Give it plenty of time to finish.
  10. Empty Trash

if you are stuck at step 7, report back.

Thank you for the quick reply! I have already started copying the data from the old drives to the new one and I put each individual show into its own root level folder (I.e. g:\Show1, g:\Show2,
Etc) without doing anything else first. I’m just copying the content over so far. It’s taking a long time as there is a lot of content.

Does it matter that I didn’t create a folder and then copy all the show folders into that - I’ve always had each shows folder at the root of the drive and does it matter that the drive was basically empty before I started copying content into it? I haven’t made any changes to Plex at all yet. I’m just copying files to get everything where it needs to be in it’s new home first. When everything is copied I’ll follow the process you listed. This should still work, right? Scan so I see 2 of everything and THEN remove the content from old folders?

As a side note, I also now need to split my backups of content across two drives as the single 10TB drive backups sync to now is no longer going to be large enough to contain everything one a little more content is added but this all happens outside of Plex at the system level. Just another annoyance to running out of space for content.

I cannot recommend doing that. Always point Plex to folders, not “naked” drive letters. Automatic scanning will work better that way.
Plus, Plex doesn’t need to ignore all the hidden folders which are present in a “root” folder, like the trash can etc.

But that is easily mitigated. Once you are done with the copying, moving all these folders into a subfolder is done in seconds.

It should

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