Plex movies move to another drive letter?

General Discussions
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hi @ all,

is it possible to move my plex library to another drive without having to manually assign problematic movies again? Does plex recognize a movie already in the database when it only changes location?

best wishes!

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Probably the best way would be to copy the movies rather than move initially.

That way you should end up with duplicates of everything and those that aren’t duplicated will be the ones that will need to be manually matched.

Once happy with the results remove the old path and rescan.

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copying anywhere to another drive makes plex recognize them as identic twins without having to rematch them?

unfortunately this is not an option since drive space is very limited (and the reason for the initial thread question).
so the only option I now have is to

  1. close plex
  2. move everything to a larger drive and assign the same drive letter
  3. open plex again?
4

There’s a standard process for moving files, and it pretty much does require making copies. What you have to do is add the new location of your files to the library source. (Keep the old source and files in place)

Once added, Plex will scan the new location. Each file it finds there it will match as a duplicate to one in the old location. After that, you can then remove the OLD source from the library source panel, scan one more time, and you should be done.

WARNING: THIS MAY SCREW EVERYTHING UP:
If you prevent trash from being emptied on a scan, I suppose it MIGHT POSSIBLY be able to change to a new drive letter without doing a copy. I think that you might be able to shut down Plex, change the drive letter of the drive, start up Plex, add the new drive letter as a second library source, and scan. I don’t know whether Plex will treat offline files (the old drive letter) the same as online files when it comes to duplicates. It seems to me that as long as you don’t empty trash on your database, the database ought to see duplicates just fine, but if my guess is dead-wrong your database might delete all “missing” files before you can scan the new drive letter.

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5

Move Media Content to a New Location

There are basically three options. Use the one best suited for your setup.

Option 1: Keep drive letter & path the same
From a Plex perspective, the easiest is keeping the same drive letter, path, etc. Nothing changes in Plex.

Option 2: Duplicates
A second option is to have duplicates exist for a short period of time. As @Xhaka mentions, you can copy, not move, the files to the new drive. Add the new folder location to the appropriate Plex library, then re-scan the library. Plex will pick up the new location and list the files as duplicates. You can move your media in stages, you do not have to move it all at once. They exist as duplicates for only a short period of time.

Example:

  1. Move ten movies to new location (ten is an example, move as many as you want)
  2. scan to pick up changes
  3. In Plex Web, sort for duplicates (vs All) to make sure Plex see the media in the new location.
  4. delete files from original location
  5. Scan library & empty trash to remove duplicate entries in database

Option 3: Move files to new location
If the second option is not viable for your setup, you can move the files to the new location. As @Divideby0 mentions, stopping Plex from emptying trash after scans is key to making this work. Your Plex server will see everything as duplicates, but this is cleaned up at the end of the process.

See the “Moving Content to a New Location” section of the support document linked above.

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6

On re-reading your post, I guess I am a bit confused on what exactly you want to accomplish. Your title states you want to move to another drive letter, which to me means you just want to change the letter of your media drive, and have Plex note the change. This would not involve any moving of data from one physical drive to another. To me, this seems like an odd thing to ask for since drive letter changing won’t fix storage problems. So it’s probably:

B: You want to upgrade your drive to a bigger one. And for reasons unstated, it appears you cannot just transfer data from drive A to drive B, keep both connected to the computer at the same time, and do what @Xhaka suggests. Since you ruled THIS out as an option, I am left to speculate.

Perhaps C: Your computer has only enough rack space for the existing media drive, and you cannot physically fit a second drive to have 2 installed at once? That, or IDE cable limits. Or SATA ports all used up.

Maybe D?: Your media is spread across multiple drive letters, with movies on one drive, and TV Shows on another. You wish to consolidate them onto one drive (maybe one of the existing drives), which would require a letter change for media for one of these two drive contents.

I don’t know. My mind acts up all funny when I don’t have things explained down to minute details and imagines all kinds of possible scenarios. If I am wildly off in my guesses, that’s fine. You can ignore my ramblings. @FordGuy61 FordGuy provided some bang-up summaries of your options, and now I suppose we just wait for you to say whether provided options are viable, or not. :wink:

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I want to expand to another drive. but I guess I have to copy it over and change the drive letter so that plex does not even see a difference.

before 8TB to later 16TB on the “same” drive (letter P:) with the same folder structure.

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