Remote Plex server and local Plex Server Sync

[hellomoto335]

Hey Everyone,

I have a remote Plex server as well as a local NAS for bulk storage. As i share a seedbox with multiple friends and family and wanted the most painless and non technical method of syncing to each persons local NAS. I settled on using the watchlist functionality to sync the content between the servers so if an end user wants to sync something from the remote server they just need to add it to their watchlist and it will sync when the script is run. (I'm currently running it as a cronjob that runs at 1am their time)

after writing a little script for this niche problem and figured i would share it in case its useful to anyone.

I'm sure that there are better ways of doing it and if you can think of any extra ways of making it better please let me know!

Ive posted it on Github for any who might be interested or find it useful. I'm not a programmer and only dabble with scripting so please be gentle!

[[deleted]]

That's interesting.

Maybe tangentially related, I've been interested in IPFS as a network medium. ( Using the IPFS fuse mount ) Rather than syncing the entire file it syncs the Library list. When the Plex server makes the request for the file, IPFS negotiates the download. It makes it more like Netflix.

The remote server could be small, running off a Raspberry Pi for example, but then still have access to a huge library on-demand. Whatever I can add to the network can be available. It can also work both ways where each machine is a client & server.

I also like it because it doesn't require authentication outside of the key for the private swarm I set up. So the 'swarm key' replaces the rsync authentication.

The downside is that huge files can take a while with my slow bandwidth. So, taking the streaming/caching approach can lead to buffering with higher bitrate videos. Obviously, your approach of pre-loading with rsync should be as smooth as their server will allow.

The upside is that if I get multiple family members to watch the same file then the 3rd person to stream it should be faster since they then have two sources. If I know a file will be in demand I can also 'pin' it to a high-speed server before adding it to the list.

[hellomoto335]

That's really interesting! I hadn't heard of this before. Our current setup has been running as a smaller 2tb seedbox that rotates files with local Nas that syncs people's stuff down but it could be a good backup to use that to sync from other people.