I did something really really dumb last night….
I made my new Plex VM on my ESXi environment that I recently stood up on an R820 with 1tb of ram to move away from my old R910 with 256 gigs. Anyways, I got all the automated stuff working right at the system level so all I needed to do was export the config from the source server. I connected directly to the source server and loaded XFCE4 and Filezilla so I could have the lazy GUI for SSH transfer of the files between the two since there were some plugins I wasn’t going to bring over. Before I started the transfer I had to destroy the test config on the destination server which I started to do through Filezilla which is just telling Filezilla to delete everything in /var/lib/plexmediaserver and that started out fine. It was slow. When you delete through Filezilla it deletes everything item by item. Delete this file, ok it’s deleted, now delete that file, ok that is deleted X thousands of files. I stopped that process and decided to just use the terminal to delete. I opened it and ran rm -r /var/lib/plexmediaserver.
It completed in about 30 seconds.
It was the wrong server. It was the source server. So all those months of tuning and tweaking gone. Shit.
A few perks though. My actual library data is fine. My Plex is a fresh install. I got to turn off the R910 immediately because there was no going back. Now my server room is noticeably cooler because that massive system is off.