Non-existant plex servers still show

[OttoKerner]

@nurbles

So the change was made to protect Plex (somehow) from someone who already has full access to the server’s file system (in order to “specially prepare” a folder)? Sorry, but I really don’t see that as very much protection for me – certainly not balanced by the difficulty of finding and correctly creating the setting manually.

It was solely to protect your server and your files/data. It never posed a threat to plex.tv
The security researcher who found this issue, saw fit to list it in the CVE database and thus pretty much forced Plex Inc’s hands. Security: Regarding CVE-2020-5741

@nurbles

However, even if I had found them, the preparation steps would’ve been rather difficult to perform on the TOTALLY DEAD source machine.

As long as the hard drive or SSD(s) which held the Plex data folder and the Windows registry are still intact, you can connect them to the new machine and salvage the data this way.