I add and replace hardware and operating systems pretty frequently, as I imagine a lot of Plex users do. Because of this, I do not fully utilize some of the great features of Plex–simpl tings like ratings and playlists. So here is my idea: since most of the media we use is mapped to a canonical with a unique identifier for agents, then wouldn’t it be simple to maintain a pretty light weight file for each of these artifacts for a Plex user? Just a table of key value pair mappings with userId and the keys for the media basically would make the physical location of media largely irrelevant.
That what is already done in the main database file.
However, for “home video” media or photos there is no such unique identifier.
And if you change your primary agent for your movie library, the unique identifier will also change.
Move your Plex data folder to a separate hard drive. When you switch servers, bring this hard drive to the new machine.
Make sure that the mount-points with your media are identically named like before.
Then you can continue on your new hardware without much interruption. All metadata will be already there and no library update is necessary to get up and running.
Oh, and remove those old servers from your account, if you are never going to spin them up again: https://app.plex.tv/desktop#!/settings/devices/pms
Thanks, Otto,
What I totally glossed over in my idea was that this approach would allow for a single user experience that would bridge multiple servers. So instead of fragmented ‘audiobooks’ libraries, I could have a set of records of audiobooks that joins files to multiple servers.
Had a bit of recency bias in my original post since I was in the middle of upgrading an old server. . . which would have gone a lot better if I read your reply first.
