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+--- Thread: Old drive crashed, trying to restore Jellyfin on new drive (/t-old-drive-crashed-trying-to-restore-jellyfin-on-new-drive)
Old drive crashed, trying to restore Jellyfin on new drive - Zippy1970 - 2025-12-20
I previously had a Jellyfin server running on a Mac Mini with Debian Trixie. This setup worked perfectly until I started seeing disk I/O errors on the console. Eventually I could no longer SSH into the system, most likely because essential system files had ended up on bad sectors.
I replaced the disk, installed a fresh copy of Debian Trixie, and then installed Jellyfin using the official method:
curl https://repo.jellyfin.org/install-debuntu.sh | sudo bash
This installs Jellyfin correctly and the service starts fine on a clean system.
I still have access to the old (partially failing) disk and can read most of its contents. My goal is to restore Jellyfin settings, users, and library configuration from the old installation.
I initially tried copying the following directories from the old disk to the new system:
/usr/lib/jellyfin
/usr/share/jellyfin
/usr/share/doc/jellyfin
/etc/jellyfin
/etc/default/jellyfin
/var/lib/jellyfin
However, after doing this and starting Jellyfin, I get these errors when trying to access Jellyfin through my browser:
12/20/2025 1:49:59 AM +01:00 - Error while starting server
12/20/2025 1:49:58 AM +01:00 - Migrate stage PreInitialisation.
12/20/2025 1:49:59 AM +01:00 - There are 0 migrations for stage PreInitialisation.
12/20/2025 1:49:58 AM +01:00 - Migration Startup
12/20/2025 1:49:58 AM +01:00 - Initialise Migration service.
12/20/2025 1:49:57 AM +01:00 - Migration Service
12/20/2025 1:49:57 AM +01:00 - Storage Check
12/20/2025 1:49:57 AM +01:00 - Storage path /var/lib/jellyfin (Fixed) successfully checked with 96.7GiB free which is over the minimum of 2GiB.
12/20/2025 1:49:57 AM +01:00 - Check path /var/lib/jellyfin for storage capacity
12/20/2025 1:49:57 AM +01:00 - Storage path/var/cache/jellyfin (Fixed) successfully checked with 96.7GiB free which is over the minimum of 2GiB.
12/20/2025 1:49:57 AM +01:00 - Check path /var/cache/jellyfin for storage capacity
12/20/2025 1:49:57 AM +01:00 - Storage path /var/lib/jellyfin/data (Fixed) successfully checked with 96.7GiB free which is over the minimum of 2GiB.
12/20/2025 1:49:57 AM +01:00 - Check path /var/lib/jellyfin/data for storage capacity
From this, I assume that copying the entire Jellyfin installation and state directories is not the correct migration approach.
What is the supported or recommended way to restore Jellyfin data (users, watch history, and library configuration) from an old installation after reinstalling the OS on a new disk?
Specifically, which files or directories should be copied from the old system, and which ones should not?
RE: Old drive crashed, trying to restore Jellyfin on new drive - Zippy1970 - 2025-12-20
Ah, never mind. This *is* the correct way to do it. I simply forgot to create the transcoding directory on the new drive. After I did, everything worked again.