I am stuck with my new PMS.
I transferred both data and PMS data according to the manual above.
I can see all the data in the libraries. I added the new server’s library content folders (without removing the old/original ones) and updates are being done. But the items in the small libraries which I updated first are not showing the new folders’ matches, only the old ones:
This is true with all items in all libraries.
I have no clue on what to do…
did you refresh the Library, after adding the new path?
It auto-refreshed. Right now, another (big) library is going to be refreshed, so I cannot do anthing else other than waiting for these to get finished.
But the first two were rather small libraries and auto-update finished pretty quickly.
Can something be seen from the logs why no new path can be found?
Wait until it’s finished, and then, if more libraries are needed, disable auto update so you are in control, and not PMS
Funny… while I read your answer, I went to the server again to uncheck auto-update… unfortunately, the first of two Music libraries just finished to update and in that library, all the songs are now playable, but in the video libaries, they are still missing.
As I sais, now another big library is auto-refreshed. I disabled further auto-refreshment, but I will have to wait for another hour or so.
In the Music libray, all media info has been REPLACED with the new pathes:
I had expected to see both the missing and the new path.
your data, she got legs
good job
All in all, the transfer from one QNAP to a new one has gone well. Thank you for all your support.
A few glitches are summarized below, maybe this experience can help in further development or updated documentation:
I transferred a couple of movie and Music libraries (no TV shows - these are on a different PMS).
a) I transferred the content data first. It may make sense to add this “option” to the documentation, since it helps to keep the downtime of the old server to a minimum. While this may not be important to everybody, the contant data transfer took two full days.
b) Add the following to the procedure:
While adding pathes to libaries, you should have the “Delete media” option disabled on the destination server. I mistakenly added a wrong path to one of my libraries. After new movies popped up in that library, I noticed that error and deleted that wrong path, but it did not delete the added movie items in that library. So I continued by deleting the items manually - which deleted the content of these items… that was the reason why these items did not show in a different transferred library of mine… they just were gone.
All was my fault, but I did not get the context until it was a little late. Fortunately, I had a content backup to restore these movies.
c) Since Plex is lacking Edition support of movies (not collection), I had a (large) number of double entries of movies (not in one item, but as two or more items in the same library - which enabled me to add edition description like Director’s Cut etc in the movie title). Most of those movie editions (not all of them) were recognized as doublettes of one of the two “transferred” movie items and after deleting the path of the old server, the second (and by that time unused) item was deleted from the library. I tried to “catch” those before deleting the original server path by checking for duplicates, but that did not work good (see next point). So, as a final step, I had to recreate the old state for each of these movie edition: split & edit two movie items for each.
d) After transferral of both content and data to the new server and after adding the new server pathes of all libraries, I noticed about half of all entries of each movie library to be duplicates now (one missing item in the old path, one new path item). But the other half of the movie entries were missing the old path already and were not listed as duplicates. There was no other library item containing the old path, these "old path"es were just gone. While as such, this is okay for me, I could not check if Plex was able to recognize everything correctly (My questions at that time: Did I copy everything correctly or did I miss something or accidently deleted something? Are my “editions” transferred correctly? Is the number of total items in the transferred library the same as on the old server? etc). Please change that behaviour to leave the “old path” in all of the items. That way, one could find instantly (a) all not-matched items (all non-duplicates), (b) find any mis-linked editions or wrongly matched movies (all duplicates with a number larger than 2).
e) I was missing a library sorting feature:
While showing all duplicates, I had hoped for a sorting element like “number of duplcate items” where I can easily find items “badly” matched (see above).
f) And now, I am missing something even more important:
A feature to transfer the content of a single library of one of my PMS servers to another.
I have three PMS and I want to combine them into one big, new PMS. My next step is: how to I copy my TV show library from an old QNAP PMS to the shiny new server that I bought?
And finally, I have a different question.
The third server (a Windows one) is my Plex DVR… Can I transfer the configuration of that DVR to my new QNAP server? Since I have a large number of recordings set up, and I can only add recordings while the shows are in the actual schedule, I would be happy to transfer the “programmed recordings” from one PMS to another. I would be happy to setup the DVR manually on the new server, so I do not necessarily need to transfer that also. Is that possible?
b) made me chuckle but only because I’ve been there 
e) I would ssh in and use find . -type f name "Some Film*" and have it tell me the duplicates. Not sure if that’s what you’re asking.
f) Tranferring the content is easy. It’s the metadata that you’ve been after. With expert skill, you could sqlite3 your way to glory. I’ll vote for your feature request to Export Library Metadata, and a corresponding Import Library Metadata
Well, no. I need to find out, which library items have how many “files”. I know, that I do not have any file duplicates. But after adding the new server path to a library with leaving the old server path in place, I expect to ALL library items to be duplicates with two files contained, one under the old file path (now missing) and one with the new file path (not missing). Any non-duplicate library item should be a non-matched item (since it was transferred from the old server with one item) or a newly matched item (also not correct since there should be a correct item already). Any library item with more than two items included is expected to have one mis-matched file at least.
Example:
Imagine the three movie Library items:
These library items get transferred to new server and the new server path is added to the library with a library refresh following and the bin being disabled.
If matching is perfect, then you expect the same four library items to contain the following files:
If matching is not perfect, then - for example -
NEW Server Path/Terminator 2 Nibbles Edition (Year)/Terminator 2 Nibbles Edition.mkv
could be wrongly identified as being library item “Terminator 2 (Arnie Edition)”.
In that case, the library item “Terminator 2 (Arnie Edition)” would be a (Plex term) Duplicate with three files attached:
OLD Server Path/Terminator 2 Arnie Edition (Year)/Terminator 2 Arnie Edition.mkv
NEW Server Path/Terminator 2 Arnie Edition (Year)/Terminator 2 Arnie Edition.mkv
NEW Server Path/Terminator 2 Nibbles Edition (Year)/Terminator 2 Nibbles Edition.mkv
… and library item “Terminator 2 (Nibble’s Edition)” would be a non-duplicate with only
OLD Server Path/Terminator 2 Nibbles Edition (Year)/Terminator 2 Nibbles Edition.mkv
attached.
Easy hunting if you can sort by “number of files attached” or similar.
But with one half of all “OLD” file entries simply gone and no good sorting method, but lots of library entries, this is hard to find at all before you delete these items by deleting the old server path from the library.
Correct. This would be almost perfect. Since both PMS are online, it would not be too hard have a sync library (one way) feature in place if wanted by Plex.
Just wanted to sum up the second part of my migration project… moving the content of the second PMS over to a new server manually - and re-assinging lots of user-created labels, collections and covers.
The second PMS was “TV shows” mostly…
Here, I stopped updating the content of the “old” PMS first, then copied the content data (which took three days) and after that, adding the different TV show libraries (classics, mini-series, unfinished, unseen, documentation) one by one.
Overall, it took me a week to “copy” the collections, load posters for TV show covers to the new PMS.
I don’t want to have to do this again, ever!
It took me another day to move the DVR updates into my libraries after that. 
Since I did not have the time to copy the series one by one into each new library, the matching and the fetching of metadata was sub-perfect.
One thing that I ran into more than once, was that from a series, only the first ten episodes contained data, the others did not. An one-by-one manual metadata refresh fixed that.
By now, the migration is almost complete. Now, I need to find a decent time slot to migrate the DVR with all recording lists.
Did you gain any insights into transferring the TB of data?
I suppose it’s a lot of SFTP or something, but jumbo frames and trunking,
USB 3 Gen 2, rsync, QNAP NAS apps, there’s a lot of topics.
Since all NAS were on the same LAN segment, I just used the File Station QNAP NAS app to connect to the CIFS share and direct-copy the data one share after the other.
This way, time stamps were copied, for example.
nice, thanks
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