Restoring Plex from a backup

[nick779]

Evening all,

Ill shortly be ordering 2 more reds to complete my 6 disk z2, and im going to have to backup and restore everything. I have backups of my plex jail replicating to another freenas machine, but im unsure on how to restore it properly. Its not a huge deal if I have to just install it fresh, but its going to take a few days to create the indexes for the movies and id rather avoid that if at all possible.

Is there a way to backup and restore an entire jail, or do I have to just backup the database and the indexes?

 

[SweetAndLow]

I would just rebuild from scratch. Most people would save the plexdata file and rebuild the Plex jail and copy in their old plexdata file after rebuilding. This way they wouldn't have to reanalyze everything.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

+1 SweetAndLow
Backup you plexdata folder. It's in /usr/pbi/plexmediaserver-amd64/plexdata on versions < 0.9.11.7.803
It now resides in /var/db/plexdata for versions >= 0.9.11.7.803

 

[nick779]

+1 SweetAndLow
Backup you plexdata folder. It's in /usr/pbi/plexmediaserver-amd64/plexdata on versions < 0.9.11.7.803
It now resides in /var/db/plexdata for versions >= 0.9.11.7.803

Thank you for the replies.

Bear with me, its been a very long time since I have dived into the command line for something like this. Ive tarballed the Plexdata directory, and moved it to the root of the jail, but I have no idea how to move it to my backup FreeNAS, a progress indicator would be nice too.

The Plex Jail (Main) is 192.168.1.5
The Backup is 192.168.1.7

 

[SweetAndLow]

You have storage mounted in your jail correct? Just put it there and it will be backed up on your pool.

 

[nick779]

You have storage mounted in your jail correct? Just put it there and it will be backed up on your pool.

I cant believe I didnt think of that.....

Just to appease my curiousity, is there a way to do it through a LAN as well?

 

[SweetAndLow]

tools you can use to move data over the lan could be scp, ftp, rsync.

example of scp, this will copy data from your root dir to the dataset path you specify on your freenas server.

scp /root/plexdata.tgz root@freenas.lan/mnt/tank/dataset/