How to back up your Plex Media Server on Windows Server
How to back up your Plex Media Server settings on Windows Server
The first thing to back up on Windows Server in regards to Plex Media Server is what it stores in the Windows Registry. All of your Plex settings are in this file, and backing it up to restore later will make everything much easier.
To start, press the Win key and the R key at the same time on the keyboard. This will open up the “Run” dialog on the Windows Server desktop. From here, you can type in “regedit”.
After typing out “regedit,” press the Enter key on the keyboard. Doing this action will immediately launch the Microsoft Windows Registry Editor. Then, from here, navigate to the following location.
HKEY_CURRENT _USER\Software\Plex, Inc.\Plex Media Server
Once you’ve made it to the location above in the Regedit tool, right-click on the “Plex Media Server” folder. After you’ve right-clicked on it, choose the “Export” button. A pop-up window will appear when you select the “Export” button.
In this pop-up window, find the “File name” box, and enter the name of the file. For example, “plex-data,” or “plex-data-backup” are good choices. Then, when you’ve named your REG file, choose where to export the file.
With the file named, browse to the folder in which you wish to save your registry file to. For best results, choose something memorable, so you don’t forget where it is later when backing up the exported file.
When you’ve successfully exported the registry file, save it to an external backup medium, such as a USB backup disk, or a cloud storage service like Backblaze, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc.
Restoring the Plex Media Server registry file
To restore the Plex Media Server registry file to your Windows Server, do the following. First, copy the registry file back to your Windows Server. Ensure the Plex Media Server application is installed on the server.
After installing the software to Windows Server, right-click on the registry file. Upon right-clicking on the file, the right-click menu will appear. In the right-click menu, select the “Merge” option.
When you select the “Merge” option in the right-click menu, it will import your exported file to the Windows Server registry. To confirm that your data is imported, press Win + R on the keyboard, type in “regedit,” and press Enter. Then, navigate to the location below.
HKEY_CURRENT _USER\Software\Plex, Inc.\Plex Media Server
