Due to some home infrastructure issues I had to move my Plex server machine to a new Windows domain. After doing this I could no longer log in as the user account that had been running Plex Media Server (whoops),
I tried following the instructions in this article - I still have access to the previous appdata\Local\Plex Media Server data, but not the registry entries. I don’t know why but the previous entries are empty.
I tried deleting the appdata Plex folders on the new user and copying the old folders into that location, but when I start Plex it goes through the initial setup wizard and then tells me that my previous server is unavailable. I’m signed in with the same account that owns the previous server.
I don’t need to recover media, as that’s on my NAS. I can re-scan all my libraries and files. What I want to recover though is:
That’s stored in the registry. Which most likely is stored on the (AD) Domain controller when using AD.
That’s in the plex data folder.
Which should be usable. If the old server was not cleanly shutdown, the primary database file can be damaged, resulting in the loss of all data.
The same happens if you try to copy the folder while Plex server is still running.
Thanks, I’m much closer! I restored the db and re-mapped my drives and all my libraries etc are there. However, my server shows up as a new Plex server with the computer’s hostname. My previous plex installation shows up as a pinned library but it’s unavailable.
This probably has something to do with the fact that I launched Plex once from the new profile prior to backup and it ran through the setup wizard. What can I do to restore this server instance so that it “remembers” that it was previously the other server? Since I still have everything from the previous server saved (except the registry entries) my immediate thought is to uninstall and reinstall Plex, and then prior to the first app launch, copy all the files from the old profile into this new profile. Or is there another way?
BTW, thank you to the Plex devs for this automatic backup feature!
If you don’t have the registry entries of the old server, you can’t import them to the new server.
Thus, the new server will retain its “new identity”.
You’ll need to unpin the old libraries in your clients and re-pin those from the new server.
