I’m in the process of migrating my win10 based setup to a headless debian 12 box (dedicated).
there’s plenty out there talking about metadata and how easy it is… does that all include the artwork and user profiles/accounts? who’s watched what and where they are doesn’t matter to me, but having to go through alllllll the account/profile creations and getting all the rights and whatnot setup again does, because it works as i want it to now and i don’t wanna lose that… of course i’d also prefer to keep/maintain all artwork as well…
i remember a bunch of weeks ago i was testing out a pms test server to see how having multiple servers worked and I was able to do that. I’m just concerned about the user profiles.
The Linux server will have a new identity. Plex will consider it a new server.*
Account information is stored with the account at plex.tv, not on the server.
If you share libraries with others, you will have to share them from the new server. You will not have to re-invite anyone. They will have to pin the new libraries to their home pages.
If the Windows & Debian systems both have access to the media, you can run both servers at the same time, migrating over when you deem the new server is stable. This will also let others migrate when they are ready to do so (no hard cutover).
Enable Sync Watch State & Ratings to keep the information synchronized between servers. It is an account, not server, setting. Anyone you share with should enable it as well (Managed Users are not supported).
* Each Plex server has a unique identity (like an ID number). On Windows systems, the information is stored in the Windows Registry. On Linux systems, it is stored in the preferences.xml file in the Plex Data Folder.
When moving between systems on the same operating system (ex: Win to Win, Linux to Linux), it is easy to keep the identity by copying the information between Windows Registries or copying preferences.xml to the new system. The new system is essentially a clone of the old system (and the two cannot be running at the same time).
Moving to a new system on a different OS is more problematic. There is no tool to copy the information between Windows Registry and preferences.xml (or vice-versa). Instead of manually copying the information, most people bring up the new server as a new system with a new ID and name. The downside is the need to share libraries again. The upside is you can run both servers at the same time, migrating users when convenient.
