Hello everyone. So the way I use plex is I have an old laptop dedicated as a plex server and attached to it via USB is an external hard drive containing all my movies and files. I have built my Plex library based on that. Now, that laptop is dying and I have another laptop I want to replace it with. Is their any way to take my libraries from the old computer and put it on the new computer without having to have plex rescan all my files which takes days?
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201370363-move-an-install-to-another-system/
You will want to pay attention to the Windows-specific steps, including export of a specific registry key from your current server and import it to the new one.
Otherwise, the steps are:
- Disable emptying of trash, then shut down server.
- Copy Plex directory to new location. It suggests you zip it, as moving the hundreds of thousands of media file (thumbnails, posters, backgrounds, etc) takes longer than moving a single file.
- Start server on new computer.
- If your media is not in the EXACT SAME path as before (such as a new drive letter, or a new network location for a NAS storage), edit libraries to point to media’s location. IMPORTANT: Add the new media location as a SECOND source, alongside the old source. Once Plex scans the media, it will notice that you already have plex library items for all the media, so none of the metadata should change, nor should there be any new thumbnails generated. Once this happens, you should be safe to edit the libraries to delete any reference to the old sources. Do this with each library one by one.
- Crack a beer?
Please follow the guide I linked, my post is mostly a summary, which skips over some details that may be very important for this to work successfully. It also goes into more detail on what you need to do on each step and where to find the items.
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