unraid-plex-backup-script

An Unraid userscript to back up Plex data on a schedule with minimum downtime. This should be set to Schedule Daily or Custom with a valid cron rule to change the daily run time i.e. 30 5 * * * to run it at 5:30am instead of the default 4:40am.

Plex Container

If the Plex container container_name is running it will be stopped, if only an essential backup is being done it will be restarted once the data has been added to the archive, if a full backup is also being taken, the container will be restarted after the files/directories in the stopped_backup_list list have been added to the full backup archive.

Compression

By default, this script will compress the created archive files, this is only done after the Plex container has been restarted so that the downtime is minimal. Compression can be disabled by setting compress_backup=no.

Configuration Options

• source the path of your "Plex Media Server" directory i.e. /mnt/cache_system/appdata/binhex-plexpass/Plex Media Server
• stopped_backup_list list of files/directories to include in a full backup (while plex is stopped)
• started_backup_list list of files/directories to include in a full backup (after plex has restarted, if applicable)
• destination the path to your backup directory.
  • "Essential" and "Full" directories will be created in this path so using a path ending with /plex is recommended
• container_name the name of the Plex docker container to be stopped
• notify (yes|no) Unraid notification that the backup was performed
• delete_after the number of days to keep essential backups
• full_backup (yes/no) creation of entire Plex backup (yes) or essential data only (no).
  • Yes will significantly increase the amount of time and size to create a backup as all metadata (potentially hundreds of thousands of files) is included in the backup.
• force_full_backup create a full backup every (#) number of days, in addition to regular essential data (0 to disable).
  • This will create an essential backup and then a full backup separately.
  • This setting is ignored if full_backup = yes
• keep_full the number of full backups to keep - these can be very large
• compress_backup (yes|no) compress the backups
  • this can take a long time but only happens after Plex has been restarted

Force Full Backup Schedule

By default the force_full_backup option will run a full backup the first time the script runs, and then every force_full_backup days after that.

If you wanted to specify that your full backups should run weekly on a Monday, you would set force_full_backup=7 and then in order to get the script onto your schedule, run the following command via terminal to fake a last run date:

date -d "last monday 4:40am" > /boot/config/plugins/user.scripts/scripts/last_plex_backup

This would cause the next full backup to happen on the next monday (if you are using a custom cron rule to specify the run time, you should replace the 4:40am with the time you have scheduled it to run)