I’ve been running a Plex server for a while with lots of media. Unfortunately the external drive that all of the content was stored on just does not work anymore for absolutely no reason, it’s not even that old. I want to know if there is any way to get a list of everything that was on the Plex server so I can see what I’ve lost and what I can try retrieve again. The server still starts up and works fine but obviously it can’t find any of the library folders. If anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate it.
This is an opportunity to do a full on backup of everything first before worrying about what was on the external drive. In the local host of your Plex server, go to settings section, locate Library on the left and make sure “Empty trash automatically after every scan” is UNCHECKED”. Click SAVE to save your changes. You don’t want the server to start deleting the metadata that is associated with the missing files on the dead hard drive when Plex does a automatic scan. Then Quit the Plex server and do a backup of Plex based on the Mac instructions found HERE.. Zip those backups and put them on a usb or another external drive just in case anything further gets messed up. Once your backups are done, use Export Tools plugin to export the libraries in Plex into spreadsheets. It will retain a listing of movies, tv shows, and whatever else you have in your library. Also, when you start up Plex server again, I’d start grabbing screen shots of how many libraries you have. Go into the edit sections of each library and screen shot the exact name of the volume (external drive) and the folders you used. This is so you can retain the same folder structure you had and recreate these on the new hard drive. Make sure you rename the new hard drive the exact same as the old one.
Depending on how much your external drive was, you should recover within 24 hrs if it was less than 10tb.
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This sounds like exactly what I need, thank you so much for this info. Doing backups now, will see how it goes and post an update. It’s taking a bit of time but there was ~6TB of media so I imagine there’s a lot of data.
Everything has finally finish and worked perfectly, exactly what I needed, thank you so much for your help. The screenshots weren’t necessary, the export file contained the path for each file individually so I’ll use that to make sure everything goes back in the right place.
Thank you again.
Glad to hear. Happy Plexing!
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