I recently moved my plex data directory from my f:\ to my c:\ and after I did I found that I couldn’t delete the old data directory on the f:\ because a process was locking the folder.
I did some digging and found that the f:\ was being held open by “Plex Update Service.exe” even though I had changed the data directory path in my web interface and confirmed that it changed the path in my Windows registry. All of the other Plex processes changed the location that they were looking for the Plex data with the exception of the Update Service.
I ran a trace on the update service and found that it was checking an entirely different registry key to determine which folder to start in. The key being checked by the update service is:
HKU.DEFAULT\Software\Plex, Inc.\Plex Media Server\LocalAppDataPath
which was still pointing to my old data directory. I manually updated the path in the registry, restarted the service, and everything came up as expected (and in the correct place).
I think this is a bug. The update service should probably use the same registry key as the regular Plex Server to determine where to write its logs. According to the documentation on the Plex support site that registry path is:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Plex, Inc.\Plex Media Server\LocalAppDataPath
This isn’t a huge issue as I’m sure most people don’t move their data directories around like this but it’s something that caused me a fair bit of headache as I couldn’t delete the original data directory.
On a related note, I also tried to do a repair install to see if that would fix things and it didn’t (not surprising based on the cause of the issue but worth mentioning nonetheless).
Anyway, hope this helps anyone else that might have the problem. Perhaps Plex can look at fixing in a future release.
