Migrating to new NAS.

[CrappyUserName 30]

As it's probably not something people do often I figured it was worth detailing my experience transferring to a new Synology NAS.

Old - DS415+

New - DS1522+

I didn't migrate the drives over, I filled the 1522 with new drives so I was able to have both NAS running at the same time.

I setup the 1522 with all the same shared folders and copied the media across. Note - you can mount a shared folder on the 415 in the 1522 File Station app and copy files with that. This is substantially faster than using a windows machine to copy paste from one to the other.

I had Emby backups on the 415 that I copied to the 1522.

I installed Emby on the 1522, added my premier key which applied successfully and tried to restore a backup. No backups were listed to restore. I noticed the 415 was running Emby 4.8.8.0 and the 1522 was running 4.8.11.0 so I upgraded the 415 and ran another backup. I copied this across to the 1522 but it still didn't appear. I double checked all the folder permissions and they were correct.

I decided to run a backup on the 1522 which is just the initial state of Emby at this point. This backup immediately appeared as a restore option. I double checked all the files and could see no reason why the 415 backups were not displaying. In frustration I decided to see what would happen if I selected to restore the 1522 backup, when I did that a drop down box appeared that let me select the other backups from the 415. So I did that and everything seemed to work.

No idea what the problem was there. Only thing that might be an issue is the 1522 is using DSM 7.2 and the 415 was on 7.1 and couldn't be upgraded to 7.2. So I had to download different Emby installers as Emby has a different installer for 7.2 devices.

When I checked the Emby UI, all my collections were there which was my main concern but I noticed a lot of titles across the board were missing artwork. I have Emby setup to store the image files in the media folders so I knew the images were there. I refreshed metadata for each library and set it to only look for missing data and left the replace images toggle as off. This took a really long time to run but it fixed the artwork issue.

So all done until I noticed my Soundtracks library was missing all artwork. I have a library setup for Soundtracks (actually it's just scores) configured for music. Any disc that contained an isolated score track, I ripped, converted to an ogg file and dumped it in this library folder. I have it set to store the artwork in the media folder and I would manually add the movies artwork to each track because Emby wouldn't find it automatically. I wasn't expecting it to as it's not going to match an audio file to movie artwork, but I was expecting it to save that artwork in the Soundtrack folder but it didn't.

So yeah, that was disappointing. I probably could have found where that artwork was stored on the 415 and copied it across but I didn't want to mess around telnet with no guarantees it would work without me breaking something. So I moved each soundtrack file into it's own folder and manually downloaded the artwork and thumbnail images again into each folder and Emby picked them up automatically. I'll just have to remember to keep doing that in future.

All up it took about 3 days to migrate over 17tb. Over a half a day of that was the metadata refresh running to fix the images. God it was slow..... One of my libraries is relatively small and I could see the artwork refreshing as it processed. When it got to the last few titles it took over 30 minutes to refresh the artwork on 7 titles.....

So not a completely smooth process but I got there in the end and better than the last time I had to restore a backup (years ago) and came to the realization collections were not part of the backup at that time. I was not a happy camper that day.....

Happy with the 1522+, probably overkill as I have Emby setup to not transcode anything but I just wanted a 5 bay NAS. Note - Not really something I needed but make sure you read the specs properly with the networking speed. It mentions 10GbE networking but this is only available with a separate expansion card. The 4 built in ethernet ports are all 1GbE.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, some things get stored in the server metadata folder. While it's probably too late to determine why the artwork was missing, the most likely answer is that you had configured the backup process to not include that in the backup.

[CrappyUserName 30]

10 hours ago, Luke said:

Hi, some things get stored in the server metadata folder. While it's probably too late to determine why the artwork was missing, the most likely answer is that you had configured the backup process to not include that in the backup.

For posterity, I can confirm all the options for including metadata were unticked in the backup options. I think I had it in the back of my mind that those options were for cached data and I wouldn't need them. So in hindsight I should have done a full backup with all that ticked and used that. But interestingly it seems the other metadata carried over anyway, the date added info is all accurate on the 1522.

I had expected Emby to automatically detect artwork stored in the media folders which it didn't do.

I also expected Emby to save the artwork for my soundtrack library in the media folders which it did not do. From a bit of searching the reason for that seems to be that I wasn't using a typical folder structure used for audio files like - Artist/album/track.mp3. This requirement isn't mentioned on the option pages anywhere. When I enabled the option to save artwork in the media folder I assumed this was enough as there was no notification/warning that it required a specific folder structure.

End of the day, the backup mostly worked. The server config and collections were all restored which is the main function I required. I did lose a bit of time sorting out my unusual soundtrack folder and had to wait for a metadata scan to finish but I'll take that over having to recreate all my collections like last time....

[Luke 42077]

Quote

I had expected Emby to automatically detect artwork stored in the media folders which it didn't do.

What artwork do you feel was not detected?

Can you please provide a specific example?

 

[CrappyUserName 30]

I have 4 libraries. As previously mentioned, the soundtrack library was completely missing but this was due to artwork not being stored in the media folders.

For the other 3 libraries, it seemed to be about 50% of cover art was missing. There didn't seem to be any pattern. Around half of them were just blank. Usually when artwork is blank (especially for people) it will refresh when you click on it but that didn't happen. The NAS wasn't showing any signs of activity like it does when Emby is refreshing things so I don't think it was going to find them by itself.

I didn't wait, I just selected to refresh metadata and left replace images unticked.

Looking at the logs, it did show some errors trying to load images from a metadata folder so I expect it was trying to load cached versions that didn't exist anymore. Refreshing metadata fixed it.

[Luke 42077]

@CrappyUserNameOK we will try to reproduce this. Thanks.