share your plex media hierarchy

[nojohnny101]

Hey everyone,
I recently brought my backup FreeNAS box on site for some regularly scheduled maintenance (upgrading drives, yea!). I had wanted to reorganize my plex library for a while (the underlying folder structure) but didn't want to have to replicate changes that would result from significant changes because of the remote speed of replication. However, with it onsite now, I thought I would take the opportunity to reorganize the way my media is organized for my plex library. When I first created it, I was new to FreeNAS and while it has been working fine, I have a feeling it is not organized the best.

My current setup is:

dataset1
|
|
>other_files
>media
|
|
>movies
>tv
>music

I am interested to hear how other people have their plex libraries organized. I have the correct folders and such (no problems with that), I am just curious if:
- should each "library" of plex be its own dataset?
- should all plex "libraries" live under one dataset (as I have it now)?
- does it hurt to have plex pointing at a single folder inside of a dataset as opposed to the top level of the dataset?

Again I'm just curious how other people are doing it and if you could share your rationale for that, it would be much appreciated!

Thanks!

 

[m0nkey_]

I have two datasets for my media. One for movies and another for TV shows. Both of these have compression switched off and a record size of 1MB. I do this because the data is most likely already compressed and by using a larger record size I actually save a few GB of space.

Code:

[root@tardis] ~# zfs get compression,recordsize,used,logicalused tank/media/movies
NAME			   PROPERTY	 VALUE	 SOURCE
tank/media/movies  compression  off	   inherited from tank/media
tank/media/movies  recordsize   1M		local
tank/media/movies  used		 620G	  -
tank/media/movies  logicalused  625G	  -
[root@tardis] ~# zfs get compression,recordsize,used,logicalused tank/media/tv
NAME		   PROPERTY	 VALUE	 SOURCE
tank/media/tv  compression  off	   inherited from tank/media
tank/media/tv  recordsize   1M		local
tank/media/tv  used		 961G	  -
tank/media/tv  logicalused  969G	  -
[root@tardis] ~#

 

[Jailer]

I have one dataset with all of my media organized in seperate directories by type.

 

[danb35]

I have one dataset for all my video; other media (music, photos) is on another dataset.

 

[nightshade00013]

The bad thing on my setup is that each dataset has to be added to the jails storage separately. However I can set each one to snapshot at different times, photo's has snapshots more often than anything else so that if something is deleted inadvertently I can potentially recover. I also have some other directories that are linked in to plex from pictures that my wife's or my phone take and are synced with Syncthing. The phones are set as master but Syncthing has trashcan file versioning set to 180 days.

 

[nojohnny101]

Thanks for sharing everyone:

I have one dataset for all my video; other media (music, photos) is on another dataset.

Would you care to explain why you have it setup like this?

The bad thing on my setup is that each dataset has to be added to the jails storage separately. However I can set each one to snapshot at different times, photo's has snapshots more often than anything else so that if something is deleted inadvertently I can potentially recover. I also have some other directories that are linked in to plex from pictures that my wife's or my phone take and are synced with Syncthing. The phones are set as master but Syncthing has trashcan file versioning set to 180 days.

That is something, the ability to control individual snapshot schedules, as to why I should split things up. I don't know if that would be a good enough reason to reorganize everything though, haven't thought about it much recently.

The only other thing is that I am comfortable with the command line so when I need custom permissions for plex's needs, I can do that without much trouble (as the GUI only give you dataset level controls for permissions).

 

[adrianwi]

After several years of using Plex, I've switched to emby but the data structures are exactly the same!

mnt
> pool
>> media
>>> tv
>>>> show
>>>>> season
>>> films
>>>> some are grouped into folders (e.g. 007, Star Wars) but most just in the films folder
>>> dvr (have this separate as it's writable by media server)
>>> iptv (folder for latest .m3u file so I can also browse IPTV services)
>> backup (this is separate to media as the source data lives on an iMac, with FreeNAS as a backup)
>>> music
>>> library (photos)
>>> video (home videos)

 

[diedrichg]

I am also an Emby user, but it is the same for Plex - one dataset with TV, Movies, and Music as folders with content in their own sub-folders.

To keep things clean, it would be best to have your movies in their own folder so that all their images are in one place and can be easily cleaned up when the movie is deleted. If your movies are not in their own folder, you can easily do this with Filebot. I had do this myself and it wasn't too much trouble, it just took some understanding of the software.

 

[nightshade00013]

Yeah each movie in it's own folder is good for a couple things. I was already doing this with Music but after having a single huge folder with Movies Plex started to crawl when scanning. I actually have a folder for movies that start with a number as well as all the alphabet each having a folder then a movie folder under that. Plex scans in the snap of the fingers and I can drop SRT's in the folder if I need subtitles along with other assets and things do not get mixed up.

 

[nojohnny101]

I was already doing this with Music but after having a single huge folder with Movies Plex started to crawl when scanning. I actually have a folder for movies that start with a number as well as all the alphabet each having a folder then a movie folder under that. Plex scans in the snap of the fingers and I can drop SRT's in the folder if I need subtitles along with other assets and things do not get mixed up.

Interesting. I didn't know plex scanned like that. So inside your movie directory, you have a folder for each movie, even if it doesn't have any additional related files (like subtitles). And having it setup this way speeds things up how?

Seems like you have some beefy hardware and you were experiencing library scan slowdowns before you changed to doing it this way? How many movies do you have? I'm only running a Intel G3258 and mine isn't "crawling".

 

[nightshade00013]

Correct. Part of it helps with organization. But when I had one folder and everything dumped in it took a long time to scan through, this included the mp4's and some srt's. I tried to separate them out by something semi alphabetical and it would then add every srt in the folder to every movie so not say you are watching Shrek while getting the subtitles to Saw... made for a VERY messed up watching experience. This was all a while ago and my dual e5640 box was literally having a tough time scanning through before I started dividing them up. Before a complete scan would take a couple minutes, now it's about five seconds. I used to have to scan a couple times as well to catch everything if I added a bunch of stuff in.



I was already doing the same thing for music and when I switched the movies over to this format I also did my tv series the same way.