I’m running the official Plex app on TrueNAS Scale. I am using Plex mainly to serve my music and there’s almost 1TB in my Music library.
Over the years I’ve had to make tweaks to the meta data in the music due to Plex not detecting the correct info / artwork etc.
My question is how do I backup my music so I can restore it again, not just the files, also all the meta data as when I restore I don’t want to have to redo all the meta editing again?
Thanks.
You should probably use Musicbrainz Picard to tag your music files rather than let Plex use Musicbrainz.
Picard will tag the actual files with permanent tags - AFAIK Plex retains a separate metadata store.
Only trouble is, it’s too late now, years of edits, too much pain to start again.
Where is the metadata stored in Plex on TrueNAS Scale? Can that be backed up and restored?
Click Edit on the Plex app and check your storage configuration. If it’s set to ixVolume, look in .../ix-applications/releases/plex/volumes/ix_volumes.
If you were sensible when you set Plex up you put the metadata on a normal TrueNAS/ZFS dataset and not on a Kubernetes persistent virtual directory.
If it is on a Kubernetes directory, set up a dataset and add it temporarily to the Plex settings as an additional mount, then with Plex running, open a shell inside the app and copy the metadata to the new dataset with the same ownerships etc.
Then stop plex and change the definitions so that the new TrueNAS dataset replaces the kubernetes one at the same mount point.
Now you have the data visible to TrueNAS and you can use ZFS replication or snapshots to backup the data.
