I recently lost my home server - and with that my PLEX installation. With “lost” I mean a hardware crash. I did have a backup of the PLEX database on my backup server but it turned out to take much more time to restore everything than I hoped.
Now I have the idea to use my backup server not only for backups. In addition I would like to mirror every service and in case one server is no longer working, I could immediately switch all services to the (hopefully still) running machine. To do that the last piece of the puzzle is PLEX.
Is there a possibility to sync PLEX from server to server? And by that to create a cold/hot stand by?
There are many ways to accomplish what you are looking to do. I will use my own system setup as an example. I run my Unbuntu Plex Media Servers in Hyper-V VM’s. Each VM points to my NAS storage or file shares on my network. You can either create snapshots of the Plex VM’s or backup/sync the VM’s themselves by enabling replication on them. If one of your servers fail you can simply revert to a snapshot or restore the VM. You can even clone the working VM if the last two options fail. The configuration has worked well for me for years.
ghirsch76 please allow me to ask you a question: When I use ZFS on both servers and install a virtual mashine in a ZVOL and take snapshots from that ZVOL, will the PLEX database be o.k. if I restore a snapshot? Or do I have to stop the PLEX service before taking snapshots?
(Additional Info: Both servers are running ubuntu 16.04, both have a ZFS pool (Z2) with the same size and the “master” pool is beeing replicated to the “slave” pool. So I actually have most what would be needed to follow your recommendation in place already - I guess )
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