Plex Diffrent Location for Thumbnails/Metadata

[Wuast94]

Anyone know how i can move my Thumbnails and Metadata to a diffrent location ? its all on my small ssd and i want to move them to my array but dont know how to mount just thumbnails and metadata to a diffrent location.

[lotetreemedia]

best option would be:

1. Stop your plex container
2. Create a share on your array eg. newshare / or use an existing share and create a folder with /mnt/user/newshare/plex/
3. Navigate to your plex location (the command is down below)
4. Copy the config folder to the newly created directory
5. Click on your plex container and change the AppData config path to your newshare
6. Start the container

 

There must be a reason you want to move those items specifically so if you can't move your entire config directory you may be able to use symlinks to point those two folders to your array. I haven't tried this, so I'm not sure it will work. I'd try this:

 

1. Stop your Plex container
2. Create a backup of your config folder (just in case it all goes haywire)
3. Create a share on your array or use and existing folder for your Thumbnails and Metadata eg.. /mnt/user/newshare/plex/
4. Navigate to your plex location
5. Copy the Metadata folder and the Media folder to your new location
6. Rename the current Metadata and Media folders (you can delete them if this works)
7. Create the symlinks with the commands below
8. Cross your fingers and restart the container
9. Do some testing, and if it all works delete the .bak folders we've created below
10. If it doesn't stop the container and restore the /config folder backup you created and restart the container.

Commands are as follows:

 

cd /mnt/user/appdata/plex/config/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/
cp Media /mnt/user/newshare/plex/
cp Metadata /mnt/user/newshare/plex/
mv Media Media.bak
mv Metadata Metadata.bak
mkdir Media
mkdir Metadata
ln -s /mnt/user/newshare/plex/Media Media
ln -s /mnt/user/newshare/plex/Metadata Metadata

Not sure if this will work but worth a shot

[manolodf]

Has anyone had any luck with the Sym Links? 

[Can0n]

im trying this now on a server I can easily restore and not my daily driver I will let you know shortly

[Can0n]

followed kind of first line in the instructions is wrong for me

/mnt/user/appdata/binhex-plex/Plex Media Server/Media

and 

/mnt/user/appdata/binhex-plex/Plex Media Server/Metadata

anyways i have a few titles in movies and TV that are now missing album art and meta refresh doesnt appear to bring them back, trying to fix match now to see if that works

 

 

***edit appears even after resetting permissions and user/group its not working to get the few dozen album arts back at all i even removed a title and emptied the plex trash and re-added to download meta data fresh...it wont work

Edited July 20, 2019 by Can0nfan

[dRuEFFECT]

I posted here the other day thinking I got it working with nested folder mappings, but like can0n says, that doesn't work. I deleted my last post since i was completely wrong.

 

but I'm happy to say that i believe i actually got it working with symbolic links, specifically relative symbolic links, AND i needed to map the path of the symbolic link destination to the docker as well.

 

so like lotetreemedia said, copy/move the directories, create RELATIVE symbolic links (-rs not -s), and add a new mapped path to the destination. when plex is inside the docker and sees the symbolic link, it tries to follow that path. so a standard symbolic link won't work because the /mnt/user/newshare directory doesnt exist within the context of the docker, you need to also map that share to a location within the docker. maybe you could do a standard symlink too and just map the full host path to be the same in the container path, but whatever i used a relative symlink and just mapped the share to the container's root. i got it to work on all 3 folders, Cache, Media, and Metadata

stop the docker, move the folders, and create the links

cd /mnt/user/appdata/plex/config/Library/'Application Support'/'Plex Media Server'
mv Cache /mnt/user/metadata/Plex-Cache
mv Media /mnt/user/metadata/Plex-Media
mv Metadata /mnt/user/metadata/Plex-Metadata
ln -rs /mnt/user/metadata/Plex-Cache Cache 
ln -rs /mnt/user/metadata/Plex-Media Media 
ln -rs /mnt/user/metadata/Plex-Metadata Metadata

 

now your folders are linked like this

 

then add a mapped path to the new metadata share

 

and BOOM, bobs your uncle