Hi folks,
I’ve had my Plex server running on a Win10 based machine for several years and the machine is old and slow. I’ve spent a good portion of the day today trying to migrate the server to an Ubuntu 22.04 based machine but have run into problems.
I’ve been following the instructions here:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201370363-move-an-install-to-another-system/
I stopped the server on the old machine, pulled over a copy of all my media files, which I had stored in a custom directory, from the Win10 machine to the Ubuntu machine.
I then zipped up my Plex data directory, which I had in a different custom location on the Win10 machine, but has what I expect are the “proper” subdirectories in it: Cache, Codecs, Logs, Metadata, etc.
I pulled the newly created archive over to the new machine, unzipped it in /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/, chown’ed everything to plex:plex, and restarted the plexmediaserver service.
The service failed to start because the server quit with errors. Nothing I saw in any of the newly created logs told me anything about what the errors were, just that the server was shutting down with them.
So I tried something different. Instead of unzipping everything from the old Plex data directory to the new location, I just unzipped everything in ./Plugin Support, ./Media/localhost, and ./Metadata to the new location.
Then the server successfully came up, but none of the settings from the old server look like they transferred, it asked me to log in (I had disabled login on the old server), and all of my libraries and playlists showed up in the new server looking like they were still attached to the old server:
What’s going wrong such that the new server is seemingly unaware of any of the local media files, settings, playlists, etc that I think I’ve pulled over from the old server?
I’m fine setting up the new server partially from scratch if needed. What I really need to migrate from the old server, other than the media files themselves, is all of the playlists. Recreating those from scratch will be very painful.
FYI, I installed Server Version 1.40.1.8227_c0dd5a73e_amd64.deb on the Ubuntu Server.
