Moving house with Plex & Docker

So, my data is all moved from t’old machine t’new one (for any Americans, you’ll need to read that sentence in a strong Yorkshire accent. Good luck.)

That could be that, but losing all of the ‘watched/unwatched’ and progress through series would be a bit of a pain in the arse, so I’m trying to migrate the metadata of my now-old Plex install (Razorback) to the new one (Blackjack).

On Windows, Plex stores everything in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server.

In Docker, that data is located at /mnt/cache/appdata/Plex-Media-Server/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/

Plex’s FAQ does include information on moving Plex data around, but it’s a far cry from what you really need to know in a scenario like this. That is fair, as there are a large number of potential scenarios and configurations that it would be unfair to expect Plex to constantly stay on top of and document adequately – after all if it doesn’t work, people would come crying to Plex and they’d have to support that or risk the wrath of Unhappy Internet People.

I’ll make this a long story short – I’m going with the basic bitch method of just copying the (several hundred thousand) files across the network from my Windows machine. I tried zipping the whole lot up and then unzipping it on the host, but with various combinations of commands I always got the same error: caution: filename not matched, which didn’t make sense then, and still doesn’t now.
I tried a number of different solutions from researching online but decided quite quickly that this is one of those annoying Linux things that I know I’ll spin my wheels on for an hour or so, and eventually just have to do it the basic way anyway.

So, I skipped ahead.

At the very least I am grateful that Plex have kept the folder structure and mechanisms broadly identical across different platforms. I’ve certainly dealt with software in my time where a Windows and a Linux version of an app were entirely incompatible and there was no hope of moving settings from one to the other, so this is a refreshing change from previous experiences.

Of course now we’ll have to see if this actually works or not. I have … middling hopes of success, but we’ll see.

A few hours later …

So the metadata is all copied over. I started the Plex Docker and immediately went into the server settings and edited my libraries; the existing libraries pointed at the old media locations, which was good. I added the new locations and let Plex scan them.

And … it worked! My On Deck still shows a half-watched episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and my watched / unwatched lists are all there.