Plex files over the network

General Discussions
1

Hello,

With the new block that Plex will apply on Hetzner, I will be forced to move the plex server itself to my home, however the content will be mapped on folders through SSH (fstab - fuse.sshfs).

My question is, can I also do that for the plex media server files? The ones located (on ubuntu) on /var/lib/plexmediaserver. The folder uses around 249GB, and I cannot transfer them over as it would take most of my available space on that device.

I have around 50ms of ping to the server (I live in Portugal, server is in Germany), I have good bandwidth and the server does as well.

I will be the only user using it.

I know I can do this, I just don’t know the effect it can have on plex itself. Will take more time loading the information? Will that time be reasonable? Should I use rsync instead of SSH?

This will only be a somewhat temporarily (around 3 to 4 months) thing as I was already planning on building a NAS at home, I just can’t find disks in stock (where in the well are all the disks?) and decently priced…

Thank you

P.S.: I haven’t receive the plex email regarding my server provider being blocked, but that may be just a lost email somewhere (not on my spam folder), no idea if I have any setting that will “save” me.

2

No. It will corrupt the database.

Even putting the Plex folder on a local network drive is not supported. See Plex Metadata on a Network Share.

You can try deleting thumbnails to help reduce the size. See Why is my Plex Media Server directory so large

3

Thank you for the information.

This are my current folders:

# du -sh -- *
9.6G    Cache
11M     Codecs
468K    Crash Reports
4.0K    Diagnostics
203M    Drivers
15M     Logs
223G    Media
11G     Metadata
4.0K    plexmediaserver.pid
4.0K    Plug-ins
5.3G    Plug-in Support
4.0K    Preferences1.xml
4.0K    Preferences.xml
93M     Scanners
16K     Setup Plex.html
4.0K    Updates

What if put only the Media folder under a network share? Would that be bad as well (not talking about latency, that of course will be “bad”, but will it corrupt anything)?

I have a 1TB disk, but filling it with only plex wouldn’t be ideal, but if it’s the only way, then that’s the way.

4

I’ve never tried such, but it seems like it is asking for trouble.

At a minimum, performance would greatly degrade. It would take longer to display cover art, scrubbing forward/back while playing probably would not display thumbnails. The time to generate thumbnails, etc when adding media would greatly increase.

You can always give it a go and see what happens. If you do, be sure and backup the database files first, in Plug-in Support/Databases, just in case things go really bad.

5

Screw it, it’s just space, gonna put the entire plex media server’s metadata on the device, the content will have to be remote, at least until I buy the server for my home, when I’ll also move the plex server again :sweat_smile:

Thank you for the informations.

6

@Karbust

If I may add?

By default, all the image file generation is turned on.
You can turn that off and delete the unwanted files (Edit each section - advanced tab)

With it pruned down, knowing I have, inclusive of 200,000 test files,

[chuck@glockner plexmediaserver.2003]$  du -ms .
82936	.
[chuck@glockner plexmediaserver.2004]$

makes it a lot more manageable

7

I have 252756 files inside /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server, I’m not turning off the image file generation because I use it a lot without even noticing xD

But thank you for the tip, I already disabled and deleted where they are not necessary, only saved me about 1GB, was a small library.

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8

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