I am looking to start backing up my PMS. I keep backups of my movies/shows/music, but it occurred to me the other day that I have edited a lot of content for individual files on Plex and I am not sure if that is being backed up or not. From my understanding, the backup that Plex performs is only a backup of core PMS content
I want to know how to make sure that all of my metadata content is backed up. Information like covers to movies I have custom uploaded, the names of shows or descriptions I have changed/written, ratings, play counts, and other such details. How can I make sure this content is backed up? I read somewhere about saving the entire PMS directory and the preferences.xml. Will that get everything backed up properly? Is there a better way to do it?
What particular file/directory contains the metadata that I have changed/edited for information like movie/album covers, episode names, ratings and view history?
the plex.db and the preference file can wholely re-create an entire plex install, other than any file based plex metadata (images/subtitles/etc). Text data/ratings/history is all stored in the DB.
do be advised, that plex metadata folders are filled will hundreds of thousands of tiny folders and files, and backing up/restoring the entire plex data folder can take DAYS or longer depending on the size of your media library and the speed of the drive the plex data is stored on (and being restored/moved to).
Having stored plex data folder on an ssd will help increase backup/restore speed, but even ssd will slow down on reading/writing the folder/file structure of the metadata.
Thank you flow and TeknoJunky. So I’ll just periodically back up that entire folder. It seems like that will get everything I need, in case of some mishap.
I have Plex installed on a Raspberry Pi, so it might be easiest to just backup the entire SD card. The Plex folder was around 5 GB in size.
