Server Version#: Latest @06/20/25
Player Version#: ibid.
Did I do something wrong? I followed the old server backup, copy/move & new box setup directions closely, and in recommended order. I noticed that most of my movie and video titles’ customizations (title, sort title, date & posters/bg’s), didn’t carry over.
And all the previously checked, orange-box-highlighted areas on the “General” tab of the “Edit” menu were gone. So I have to retitle, or at a minimum go through, thousands of movies if I want to duplicate my old setup. Uhhh. Not good.
Also, none of the custom posters or backgrounds I uploaded show up in the Edit menu. They’re in the folders, since they were copied over, but I have to use the “Add Image” option in the Edit>Poster and Edit>Background menus to get them to appear again as clickable.
Maybe I missed an area of the instructions that addressed this?
The omission was on my end. I Rescanned my Library files as was noted, but didn’t Refresh All Metadata – an additional step that’s required if I wanted to retain my customizations, e.g., field entries, backgrounds, posters & such.
Once I did that extra step, it looks like everything has locked up nicely, just as it was before.
But if I hadn’t read those details in the guide after you suggested I look at it again, I might not have had that success, so thank you for your reply, Tom. It compelled me to take another look at the guide.
With thousands of titles in my library, it’s no small feat to browse through everything, even if it’s just visually. My eyes get tired.
I’ve gotten through only to the letter “M” in my library, and after the move, the rescan of libraries and the refreshing of metadata, only about 70% at best of my customizations were carried over.
PLEX didn’t do the job…not by a long shot.
For server-mac users of PMS, I would say that moving your install to another box is gonna leave you with a library that will be different-looking than what you have now. Any entry field that you’ve “locked” in the edit menu – text or graphics – is automatically unlocked. You’ll lose your customizations and the poster & background images you chose will likely be replaced.
I am unable to see any rhyme or reason why some titles retain the customizations while many others don’t. Like I said, 70% at best carried over and that’s probably generous. There doesn’t seem to be any predictability.
Worse, after the requirement to buy a PLEX Pass for the sake of my handful of remote users, my server – even when it’s not being accessed – is now hammering the cpu and hard drives seemingly ALL THE TIME. It wasn’t that way before.
This is the first – and will be the last – time I bought a PLEX pass. I was wise to do it for only one year. By the time the year is out, I’ll have built boxes for my users instead, so they’ll have their own media libraries. I’ll take my server offline and use PLEX for its interface only. I’ll turn every outside-connectivity option off and if there’s any scraping that needs to be done for metadata, i’ll do it manually.
And I’m gonna stop applying updates. The future of PLEX seems clear to me now. Longtime users like me who relied on it to serve our own personal libraries and nothing more are no longer part of the equation.
Take a look at the guide again. The posters are not stored in the database but rather in a separate directory structure. The Copy Server Data From the Source System section talks about this and links to another article discussing this directory location. You should copy the ENTIRE directory as that’s where the images are stored.
I’ve personally done this a few times and never lost custom posters are my selections in the process.
