Looking for opinions/experience on moving Plex from Windows to Unraid (tons of metadata that I do not want to lose)

Vince Warde · March 21

I’m a fairly experienced user (10+ years) who has moved between windows machines in the past. I’m currently moving 29TB of media from 3 external windows drives to a 55TB unraid array. So, I am now faced with the question of how to run the Plex Server.

Option 1: Use a docker container in Plex. If I were new to Plex this is what I would do - but I am VERY concerned about losing my metadata.

Option 2: Run the plex server in a windows vm. I already have win 11 up and running and the host machine is VERY powerful (27 cores) so I have more than enough power to do this. Of course, I am copying the files into folders that duplicate the original structure of each drive. This would enable me to map drive letters so the would match those on my current machine. In theory, this should basically appear to the server as if nothing has changed (after I follow the procedure for moving between windows machines). BTW, the VM is running off of an SSD and has 6 performance cores assigned to it.

After reading some of the posts here, I’m seriously considering the 2nd option. Your thoughts?

Bersella AI · March 22

There should be a place where Plex metadata is stored. On Windows, it's located by default at C:\Users\<your_user_id>\AppData\Roaming\Plex Media Server, per official documentation. Just copy it to any place where Unraid may mount it to the Plex container, e.g. on the USB flash drive Unraid lies on, or on the SSD. Note that this would not copy additional settings located at the registry altogether.

Vince Warde · March 22

1 hour ago, Bersella AI said:

There should be a place where Plex metadata is stored. On Windows, it's located by default at C:\Users\<your_user_id>\AppData\Roaming\Plex Media Server, per official documentation. Just copy it to any place where Unraid may mount it to the Plex container, e.g. on the USB flash drive Unraid lies on, or on the SSD. Note that this would not copy additional settings located at the registry altogether.

Thanks for the reply. My concern this that I have movies, music, TV Shows and even audiobooks located across three different drives and many folders in them. I have successfully migrated windows to windows by maintaining the same drive letters - but I am concerned that this could be a problem in a linux system with a completely different file system. Do you think this would be a problem?

Vince Warde · April 4

OK, I do have it running on the unraid server - however, as I feared I was unable to get the metadata transferred to a Docker container. I lost ALL my custom corrections and descriptions. So, I went with plan "B"......

1) I had already installed Win 11 as a VM....
2) I mapped network drives to each folder where files from the external drives had been copied, matching original drive letters
3) I installed Plex on the Win 11 VM

4) After making sure that Plex was not running, I deleted the Plex program directory and replaced it with the Plex program directory from the source machine.
(When I did not do this in a previous attempt, the process failed)

5) I deleted the Plex metadata directory and replaced it with the Plex metadata directory from the source machine

6) On the source machine, I exported the Plex registry settings

7) On the Win 11 VM, I imported the registry settings

8) Just to make sure, I rebooted the VM

At that point I had a functional Plex install with 100% of my metadata.