Backup Jellyfin on Linux

[Daniel E. Shub]

I am new to Jellyfin and my experience with media servers is so dated as to be worthless. I have a Jellyfin 10.8.10 installed on an Arch Linux VM that I plan on using as my media server. I have my music, movies, and photos stored in local storage mounted at /media. I was able to login to the webpage and get a very basic setup running. I am very impressed so far. Before I go much further and make it available to the rest of my family, I want to make sure I can recover from a total drive failure. I already have /media backed up. I don't care about backing up any data (e.g., cover art) that can be downloaded again. I am ok with losing my watch/listen history, although if it is easy to backup great. What I do not want to lose is the configuration and user created data (e.g., playlists).

From what I read on line, different installation methods result in different directory structures.

Code:

$ cat /etc/conf.d/jellyfin
# Data directory
JELLYFIN_DATA_DIRECTORY="/var/lib/jellyfin"
# Cache directory
JELLYFIN_CACHE_DIRECTORY="/var/cache/jellyfin"
# Additional options for the binary
JELLYFIN_ADD_OPTS=""

$ ls /var/cache/jellyfin/
audiodb-album  audiodb-artist  images  temp

$ ls /var/lib/jellyfin/
config  data  log  metadata  plugins  root  transcodes

There is also /usr/lib/jellyfin/ which seems to be system files.

Can I ignore /var/cache/jellyfin (how big will that grow for a moderate sized home library) in my backup? Do I need all of /var/lib/jellyfin/? Are there other directories that I need to backup?