Back up and restore Emby / rebuild QNAP NAS

[DougBell 1]

I have Emby installed on my QNAP NAS along with all the media content.

I've recently purchased new, larger drives and swapped them out one at a time (4-bay NAS, configured as RAID5) however I can't utilise all the space as my inode value is too small.

From reading, the only way to fix that is to blow away the storage volume and start again. Obviously this will destroy everything on that volume including the media and also the installed apps like Emby.

I've managed to back up all the media to other drives elsewhere, I'm almost at the stage now of erasing the storage volume and building a new one with a larger inode value.

What's the easiest way to take a backup of my Emby - all the config, the metadata, the configured users, etc - and once the QNAP has been reset, put it all back again so it was just as it was before? I have the backup and restore plugin installed and working, it takes a backup each night around midnight and saves it to /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/Media/Emby

Presumably I'd need to pull those files from that location, store them somewhere temporarily while I reset the QNAP and then install Emby and do a restore from backup? Is there anything else I need to be mindful of, any gotchas to watch out for?

I'd much rather not start again from scratch if I don't absolutely have to! :)

 

[Luke 40018]

HI @DougBellhave you taken a look at this?

Configuration Backup

[DougBell 1]

Thanks Luke, I did have the backup plugin installed and working. 

I guess I was just looking for any other hints, tips, gotchas, etc that I might encounter, or any weirdnesses that might be unique to the QNAP. 

Over the weekend I went and reset the NAS, rebuilding the storage volumes etc. After installing emby again, entering my premiere key and installing the plugin backup, it did restore successfully. 

There were a few things I had to do manually, the other plugins that were installed didn't appear to be captured in the backup - note to others doing this, manually list the plugins installed. But the credentials for the plugins were saved. 

I also had to re-jig some of my libraries for music, movies, TV shows etc because the path names were slightly different. After the rebuild the RAIDed hard disks were in storage pool 2 as the add-on card with the NVMe SSDs were in a new storage pool 1. 

That's to be expected and was fixed by adding the new directories (e.g. /CACHEDEV2/MEDIA/Movies) to the appropriate libraries and removing their original ovations. Interestingly, I thought I might have been able to just edit the path name but it wouldn't let me so adding the new path and removing the old one was the way to solve that. 

All in all, the process went remarkably well, I've just been restoring all the media back onto the drives over the last couple of days from where it was backed up before resetting the NAS.