Seperate storage location for media analysis files

Feature Suggestions
1

I know that im not alone in 1) wanting to run analysis on all my media for thumbnails etc 2) storing the database / base plex install on an SSD.

 

Only my SSD is running out of space... 

 

I may have to delete everything and start again as there does not seem to be away to delete just the analysis files that plex generates..  my data folder is now pushing 60gb and i've only got 120 to play with... 

 

Can I request a feature that keeps most of plex in the base directory, ie thumbnails and the like, but the transcoded media analysis files can be moved off to another location.  This would be a great help. 

 

Keep up the good work though...  

 

thought I'd say im using the freenas plex port!  which works great.

 

Cheers

 

Andrew

 

 

2

You can move the entire pms folder where ever you want just put a symlink in the original location

3

You can change the location in the PMS settings quite easily.  Go to plex.tv/web/app#!/settings/server and click show advanced settings, then change the storage location for application data.

4

You can change the location in the PMS settings quite easily.  Go to plex.tv/web/app#!/settings/server and click show advanced settings, then change the storage location for application data.

thats pref is only in the windows version of server (AFAIK). nix type operating systems need to make symlinks ( he says he is using freenas)

5

Ah, had no idea this feature was Windows only... been a while since I've run PMS on Linux of OSX.  Seems an essential feature to me, so +1 andyclimb's feature request.

6

See the Plex Wiki, which seems to indicate you can set advanced settings for various *nix based too using an advanced setting.

Variable you want is "LocalAppDataPath"

Advanced Server Settings

Windows instructs to use a registry key.

*Nix, an xml file. I set my win registry key several versions before it actually appeared in the GUI to adjust.

Apologies if that is no longer correct.

7

Thanks for the input. I was wanting something a bit more specific.


It would be easy for me to relocate the entire folder using symlimks but that is not quite what I want. Most of the library is thumbnails and metadata which doesn’t take up much space. I wanted I keep this on the ssd for the sake of speed. As far as I know The indexed / analysed media files are the ones that take up loads of space. And they are all kept in the same folder structures. So there is no way to just love these big space hogging files.



I know there are lots of people in the same position. As this is a frequent question.



If it is not possible to implement. How do you go about deleting just the indexed files?



Thanks



Andrew



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

8

I think i've successfully solved my own problem.  

I've written a small bash script that when combined with the find command moves all the *.bif files to another location and replaces them with a symlink.  Seems to work, and i've just offloaded 60Gb from my SSD whilst keeping all the metadata there.  

here is the script, change /shares/plexdata to the location you want the files moved to

#!/bin/bash

var1=/shares/plexdata$( echo "$1" | sed 's/.\(.*\)/\1/')

var2=/shares/plexdata$(dirname "$1" | sed 's/.\(.*\)/\1/')

mkdir -p "$var2"

echo "$var2"

mv $1 "$var1"

ln -s "$var1" "$1"

 

it works of relative directory names as to not make a massive mess of empty directories..  i put this as my_script.sh in the plex folder "/usr/local/plexdata-plexpass/Plex Media Server/Media/localhost"

 

i then run 

find . -name "*.bif" -type f -exec sh my_script.sh {} \;

from the /usr/local/plexdata-plexpass/Plex Media Server/Media/localhost folder and it moves all the files.  if you re run it it only picks up the new .bif files.

I'm running plex in a freenas jail and i mounted my large storage to /shares/plexdata 

9

Early 2021 clean-up: duplicate