I fear that the answer here is a resounding “no,” but I wanted to see if I can restore my database/library settings after a massive hard drive failure on my Mac. I have all of my music, movies, etc., on external drives and that’s fine, but the internal drive on my iMac failed and I lost my library settings, matches, etc. I did back that up to the cloud, but it had been a long time since I’d done it.
If I log into my Plex on my iPad or Apple TV, my old library/playlists/etc. is all still there, but not connected to anything. I haven’t connected it my Plex again with fresh settings, as I don’t want to lose all of that if I don’t have to. Is there a way I can retrieve it? It’s a ton of stuff and a ton of oddball movies that I had to make entries for.
And is there a way that I can have that information back itself up in my iCloud to prevent this from happening again?
If anyone can help me, I’d greatly appreciate it, but I’d understand if it’s just lost.
Thanks!
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If you have a backup of the server data directory, you can obviously restore your server (either starting over with the existing data or by restoring a database backup inside that folder).
With the recently added option to sync viewstates/ratings to the cloud, you could save those independent of being able to restore the entire server / backup. Then again… that’ll only be of help to you if you had enabled it before your original server went south.
Plex themselves have no details/data about your former server configuration.
As for “a way forward” – it should be possible and fairly simple to create a script to save Plex’ database backups to iCloud (or fwiw any connected volume); there’s dedicated apps to archive such database backups; I guess it might even be possible to do it using the native Shortcuts app. Backing up the entire server is a bit trickier as that requires the server to be shutdown while archiving the entire server data directory.
Thanks for your response. I have one backup of a server directory, but it’s over a year old. I was installing a hard drive, and I thought I’d clean up my file naming system, which made a mess.
Is there no way I somehow export what I’m seeing on my Apple TV, which has all of my naming/playlists/etc.? Anyone have any idea?
I will make try to get my database in the cloud (maybe by just adding my entire Library to my Cloud), but I’ll look through your suggestions.
The information available in the clients is probably quite limited. I suppose all Plex “knows” is the information used to customize the app itself – specifically what libraries there are, which of them have been pinned and the order of libraries in the sidebar. The client doesn’t keep a copy of the library configuration itself. It’ll always get that information from the server… and with the server gone, that’s about as far as you get in that direction.
