Today, we're going to migrate a Plex server to another machine. If you already
have a Plex server on a PC, you may be wondering how to move everything over to
another PC without having to recreate everything from scratch. Migrating a Plex
server properly avoids having to recreate your libraries and scraping all
your metadata from IMDB and TVDB, which can be very time-consuming,
especially if you have hundreds or even thousands of movies or TV shows. I should
mention that there is a distinction between the Plex server and the Plex
media files. While you may have a Plex server on one machine, that doesn't mean
you need to have the media files residing on the same machine. In fact, I
have my media files located across several QNAP NAS file servers, and I
simply point to those network folders from my Plex server - which also means I
don't have to migrate the media files themselves. This makes things easier to
migrate the server. With that said, even if you have to move your media files
along with the Plex server, it's not that difficult. I'll talk about that later in
the video. So why would you want to migrate your server? The most common
reason is to move your Plex server to a more powerful machine. Remember, Plex
recommends a CPU with a passmark score of roughly 2000 to transcode a 1080p
video at 10 mbps, or a passmark of 1500 for a 720p video at 4 mbps.
Using this guideline, if you want to stream two 10 mbps
1080p movies at the same time, you'll need a CPU with a passmark of
about 4000. In my case, I'll be moving not only to a faster machine, but I'll also
be moving from Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2016.
I'm going to start on my destination machine, which I'll be moving the Plex
server TO. You'll first want to go to plex.tv and download the installer for
the Plex Media Server. I'll opt to open it as soon as it's downloaded.
This will take a while, so I'll skip ahead.
Once the Installer launches, click the Install
button, and wait for the installation to finish. Again, I'll fast-forward a bit.
Once it's done, I'm not going to launch the server. Instead, I'll just close the
installer for now.
Let's move over to the source machine, that has the existing Plex server.
After logging into the server, click on
the Settings icon and tab to the Server options.
Clicking over to Library, make sure the checkbox for Empty Trash Automatically
After Every Scan is unchecked, then save the changes.
Next - you don't have to do
this, but I prefer to shut down my server completely. Right-click the Plex icon in
the notification tray and Exit the server. You'll need to transfer two
pieces of information to the new server. First, you have to transfer all the files
in the LOCALAPPDATA location. Using Windows File Explorer, type
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Plex Media Server, which will take you directly to that
folder. You'll want to compress all the content in the Plex Media Server folder.
By right-clicking that folder, you can choose to compress it using Windows'
internal zip utility, or if you have 7-zip like I do, you can zip it up that
way. Keep track of the location of the compressed file because you'll need to
transfer that later. Depending on how much media you have, this can be a huge
amount of data, and thus a very long operation. To save time, you could have
excluded the cache folder if you wanted to - but in the overall scheme of things,
the contents of that folder constitutes a small percentage of data. The second
piece of information that you need to transfer is the registry. Go to the Start
menu and type in regedit.
After you open the registry editor,
you'll need to navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER,
then Software,
then Plex, Inc., and finally Plex Media Server.
Right-click that entry and choose Export. Give it a name and hit Save. Again, keep track of
where you save this file because you'll need to transfer it later to the new
machine. Now, take a coffee break and I'll come
back when the compression is complete.
OK, we're back. If you get a warning message from 7-zip stating that the Plex
Update Service log is being used by another process, don't worry about it.
It's just a log file, and there is indeed an update service that is running in the
background. It's just a log file that you don't need. You can close the dialog box
at 99% because 7-zip will never be able to get
that last log file - but rest assured, the zip file has been created.
Now let's move over to our destination machine.
As I mentioned before, you'll need to transfer
the registry export and the zip file over to the new PC. You can do this by
sending the files over the network, or by using a USB drive, or through remote
desktop. At any rate, I've already placed my two files here in Windows Explorer.
Let's first right-click the registry file and select Merge.
After clicking Yes to confirm, this will add the Plex Media Server entries into
the new machine's registry. Next, you'll need to uncompress the contents of Plex
Media Server into the same LOCALAPPDATA location on the new PC. I'll move
this zip file over by selecting Cut,
navigating to %LOCALAPPDATA%,
and pasting it to that folder.
I'll open the zip file with 7-zip,
and proceed to extract the subfolders into the Plex Media Server folder.
After clicking OK, it will complain that some of those subfolders already exist, so
you'll want to overwrite all the folders and files by clicking Yes to All. Once
again, this will take some time so I'll be right back.
Once the files are unzipped, you'll want to restart the PC - which I've already
done - and then start the Plex Media Server. Double-click the Plex icon in
your notification tray to open Plex in your browser.
You'll then want to log into your Plex account.
My video capture is being done through remote desktop, so you may see some
artifacts as it paints the screen.
You can see that all my libraries are intact, and all my media information has
transferred over successfully.
Head over to settings,
tab over to server,
and sign out.
You'll then want to click the Claim Server button to sign back in.
One more thing that you'll need to do is to manage your libraries. My media files
are out on the network, so my new Plex server is still pointing to them. All I
need to do is select Scan Library Files for each library to update them, and
everything will just work. However, if you're moving your media files to
another location, you'll need to add that new location to your library folder
settings. I won't save the changes, but once you've updated your library, you can
then delete the old location, which should be empty since you'd already moved
those files over to the new location. You'll want to do this not only for
every folder that you're pointing to in this library,
but for each and every library.
You'll notice that the Remote Access tab has a
red exclamation mark next to it, so my Plex server isn't available outside my
own network. That's easily fixable by simply changing your port forwarding on
your router. Since I'm on a different IP address, all I need to do is enter my new
address on my router. Once you've modified your port forwarding settings,
you can see that the server is now available to the outside.
I hope you enjoyed - Thanks for watching!