Metadata

[martyc1981]

I rebuild my Linux server about once a year. Trying out new distros and uncluttering all the changes I've made that year. I usually just format the drive and reinstall everything from scratch. But the number one annoyance of doing that is that I have to go through my entire media library and redo all the metadata changes that I've made. I'm absolutely fastideous about everything being labeled and sorted correctly. But, with a whole system scan, Jellyfin gets a lot wrong on the automatic metadata scans. Is there a way to back-up this data, so I can just re-import it into Jellyfin after a system wipe? I have over 3100 films and 500 TV shows to calalogue, and it takes an entire day of manual fixes to get it back to where it was.

I exclusively use Linux as my server OS, so that's all I need answers for.

[use7]

If you go to Dashboard --> Libraries --> (select the kabab menu on a specific library) Manage Library --> Metadata Savers there's a box to allow NFO file saving. This will put .nfo files beside all your media and JF can read these back in.

Other than that the metadata directory is listed under Dashboard --> Paths (default I believe is /var/lib/jellyfin/metadata), but I don't think that's supposed to be human modifiable so I would be surprised if you could just copy and past it into a new install.

[Efficient_Good_5784]

This mostly applies to servers deployed with containers, but it would just be easier to copy your entire config folder and all external metadata like nfo files saved along your media files, then paste them on the new server. All your changes would be restored when you relink them to the new container. Especially since you can host mount any path on your new system to appear like they're old paths from your old system onto the container.

You can still copy over the config folder on a direct system install, but you might need to rescan your library with new file paths if those changed.