Upgrading My Libraries - Current State of Affairs

Plex Media Server
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I’m getting a notice to upgrade my metadata library.

I’m fearful of doing this because of the huge investment in time I made to choose custom posters and background art. Manual “matching” of things that couldn’t be found, etc.

I don’t want this to get messed up.

Searching on this forum i found a thread from 2021 that had about 200 replies. some of which were gruesome experiences.

I’d like to ask, does anyone have an elaborate setup and has done this recently? Did it work well or did it make a mess? What am I in for if i do this? Is it worth it?

Server Version#: Latest
Player Version#: Latest

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It makes good sense to make a full image ‘tar’ backup of your Plex metadata first.

With PMS stopped,

cd /var/lib/plexmediaserver
sudo tar cf /path/to/backup/PlexBackup.tar  ./Library

Now, no matter what happens, you can fully recover from it and return to this image backup point.

Recovering would be: (Plex stopped)

cd /var/lib/plexmediaserver
mv Library Library.unused
sudo tar xf /path/to/backup/PlexBackup.tar
sudo rm -rf Library.unused
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Is it worth it? What’s different?

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Worth it?

If you value the time invested, having a mirror / image backup which you can restore should anything ever go sideways is a good idea.

If you’re familiar with ‘snapshots’, this is a ‘snapshot’ of your entire plex server at this point in time.

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I suppose the question was aiming at the value add of the new agents :wink:
If so… yes, they’re worth it in my personal opinion.
The new agents are faster and are more flexible / have some additional features, e.g.

  • local extras for tv-shows
  • options to include IMDB/TMDb/TVDb references in the movie / show folder names
  • configuration per library (vs. server wide agent settings)
  • …

Plus: the legacy agents are no longer maintained/updated

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6

Thanks for the backup details. This gave me peace of mind. It looks like it worked well so far. I don’t see any problems.

I really wish there was a simple backup option inside the interface that did this stuff for you. I find Linux to be a pain to work with.

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