As your media collection grows, you might upgrade to a larger hard drive, install a NAS, or otherwise simply have a need to move your content to a new location.
Note: We always recommend Backing Up Plex Media Server Data data before making major changes to your library.
Upgrading a Hard Drive
If you’re simply upgrading to a new/larger hard drive, the easiest thing to do is to name the new location exactly the same as the original one. That means simply making sure the new hard drive is named exactly the same as the old one, and that the media files are in the same location.
The general procedure is outlined below. For this example, we’ll assume that your content is currently on a hard drive named MyMediaDrive.
- Quit/exit your Plex Media Server
- Re-name the old hard drive to a different name (e.g. OriginalMediaDrive)
- Name the new hard drive to the exact same name as the original drive (i.e. MyMediaDrive)
- Copy the content from the old drive to the new drive, making sure that the content ends up in the same relative location
- Start the Plex Media Server
If you’ve done things correctly, your server won’t even know that anything has changed and your content will work right away.
Moving Content to a New Location
If you need to move content to a new location, you’ll have to go through a few additional steps.
Preparation
Disable Emptying of Trash
On your Plex Media Server, you’ll want to disable the Empty trash automatically after every scan preference for the server.
Related Page: Library
Stop the Plex Media Server
Quit or exit the Plex Media Server so that it is no longer running.
Copy Content to the New Location
Copy your media files to the desired location. You don’t necessarily have to keep the same relative folder structure if you don’t wish to do so.
Update your Plex Media Server Configuration
Start the Plex Media Server
Once your content is available on the new location, start your Plex Media Server.
Launch Plex Web App
Open your Plex Web App and you should see your libraries, though your content is unlikely to work yet.
Related Page: Opening Plex Web App
Edit Your Libraries
In order to update the content location for your media, you’ll need to Edit a library and then add the appropriate folder for where your content is now located. Leave the existing/previous folder location in there for now.
You’ll need to do this for each of your libraries, but you should probably complete the process for one at a time.
Related Page: Editing Libraries
Update the Library
After adding the new content folder, a scan of the library will probably start. If not, simply do a standard Scan Library Files.
The server will examine the contents of the new location and associate the content with the existing media items in your library.
Related Page: Library Actions
Remove Old Content Location
Once everything is completed and you’ve verified that things are working correctly and you can access your content, you can remove the old content location for your libraries. To do so, Edit the library and remove the old/previous folder location.
Once removed, you may need to empty your library trash in order to remove the entries where the content was stored at the old content location.
Related Page: Editing Libraries
Related Page: Emptying Library Trash