Plex Media Server AppData Folder is Massive File Wise

[mshriver2]

I am planning on moving my server install from Windows to Linux for multiple reasons. While following the moving server guide on the plex website, I noticed the size of my Plex Media Server AppData folder I have to move is ridiculously large. It contains 1,188,425 files, 1,223,070 folders, totaling 55.8 GB’s. Just calculating the amount of files took a good half an hour, and it is on an ssd. Another thing That seems strange is there is a folder called “Plex Media Server” inside of the app data folder /appdata/Local/Plex Media Server. So basically “/appdata/Local/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server”. Which seems to contain a duplicate of all the folders in the Plex Media Server app data folder. Any advice would be greatly appreciated as currently it would take me over 3 hours just to zip the folder. I have also disabled thumbnail generation using this guide: https://support.plex.tv/articles/202529153-why-is-my-plex-media-server-directory-so-large/

Server Version#: 1.18.0.1944
Player Version#: N/A
#movies 1,150

tv episodes 20,500

Picture of Plex Media Server AppData folder: https://i.imgur.com/2a3TQCo.png
Picture of /Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server AppData folder: https://i.imgur.com/fqJmGaM.png

[anon18523487]

That second Plex Media Folder appears to have older info. Did you change where the appdata folder is suppose to be in the past? The folder to use is suppose to point to the parent of that Plex Media Server folder, i.e. Local. Looks like you included Plex Media Server so it ended up creating a duplicate. You then changed it back to use Local. You can probably safely remove that folder. To be safe, go into the plug-in support, then database folder, and check the dates for those files. If they haven’t been used recently, then they are a duplicate from the past and you are safe to remove.

As for the number of files, that is correct. Plex does use a lot of files and folders. To speed up the backup, choose the option to just store files instead of compressing them. You’ll use a little more space but can save a lot of time.