Hi - Over the last ten years or so, I’ve amassed a gargantuan Plex library, stretched over multiple hard drives and with loads of custom thumbnails and metadata, since a lot of the stuff I have is rare and obscure. Well over ten terabytes, nearly 100 categories.
I’m running the whole thing off my iMac Pro on Mojave. Having been burned countless times by data loss in the past, I’d like to find a way to preserve the whole thing somehow for future generations. Not kidding, actually, some of this stuff is likely to become more important over time.
For one thing, batch converting all the AVI and MKV files to MP4, so they might be readable by a future OS, is one task, but hugely time consuming.
Well for one thing you need to get your media off of those external drives and on to something more stable. This is going to be tricky since you have your libraries all pointed at different media paths.
Also , do you REALLY need 100 categories (I assume those are libraries) for only 10 terabytes of media? I have four times that much media and only 40 libraries and that is probably too many libraries. In your set up that is like 100 gig per library.
Anyway, I suggest you get a NAS. YOu can get a four bay Synology DS418 for less than $400. Put two good 14tb drives in there. I use Western Digital 14TB Ultrastar DC HC530 which are less than $300 each. That will give you 14TB of space on a SYnology Hybrid Raid redundancy. If a drive fails, you still have your data. Plus you have two unused drive bays for future expansion if you need it. Dropping in two more 14tb drives will take your total to 42tb. Then just use your external drives to back THIS thing up. I personally use GoodSync to do that.
I’m a little more backup needy myself. I have an 8-bay Synology with seven 14tb drives as my main server and a 12-bay Synolgy with another seven 14tb drives that only serves as a real time backup for the main server. And I still back it all up to externals once a month.
All of your icons and metadata are burried in your PLEX server files and the best way to back THAT up is with a good overall backup program. I use Acronis and just back the entire PC up to an external USB drive every other day. I can’t tell you the number of times something has gond sour and I just boot to the restore disc and reset the entire box back to the working state it was in the prior day. There is a version of Acronis for MAC.
The hard part may be aggregating your media from multiple drives to essentially one. The best bet may be to create a folder structure on the NAS that mirrors the drives so that you can aim your current libraries at a similar path in addition to the path you have now. If you are lucky, PLEX will just see all the new data as a duplicate of the existing data and won’t try to re-import it with new metadata and art. If that works (and some PLEX gurus might want to chime in here), then after you do that, just remove the old library paths to the externals and you should be good to go.
As far as going to the trouble of converting all thise files, do you expect a future OS to not be able to read those formats? It isn’t the OS that reads it, it is the application on the OS. As long as PLEX reads them, who cares? VLC will read them.
I would agree that if you want to back this up then getting some sort of NAS would be the way to go. In fact, I’d set it up as another Plex server and migrate your stuff there. I have a Synology DS1019+ with about 16TB
