Server 2019 to Proxmox (Jellyfin Media Drive)

8 months ago by NastyNative to c/proxmox

I’m in the process of migrating to Proxmox for my media streaming and other services, as I’ve found myself increasingly limited on the Windows platform.

One of my primary concerns involves my current media storage setup. I have a 10TB external drive formatted with an NTFS partition (fully backed up), and I would like to continue writing new data to this drive within the Proxmox environment.

What would be the most appropriate approach to handle this transition? My initial assumption is that converting or migrating to a Linux-native filesystem may be the best long-term solution, but I do not yet have extensive Linux experience. I would appreciate guidance on the most reliable and efficient way to proceed.

linkinkampf19 4 points 8 months ago

I have kind of a similar setup. Got started on my Proxmox journey late last year, and I'm a veritable noob with Linux as a whole. Migrated from a bunch of individual systems, mostly Raspberry Pi SoCs, to a very neat mini PC by Bosgame. The only difference is I run a separate Synology NAS that I mounted via SMB, so that all VMs can access it. I use Jellyfin as well. Granted, I'm running in a very basic RAID 0 with 2 8TB drives, but iirc it uses ext4. Since you have a full backup already, sounds like you've done half the work. Wipe the NTFS partition, and restore the backup to the newly created ext4 partition. I think that should work.

I'll try to answer any questions, here to help as I'm able.

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NastyNative 3 points 8 months ago

Thank you for the guidance. After some research on Linux-native file systems, I compared ext4 and Btrfs. While Btrfs offers advanced recovery features, ext4 stands out for its proven stability and performance exactly what I need, especially with regular backups in place. My plan is to back up the data twice (as always), format the main 10TB NTFS drive to ext4, then migrate everything back. I'll keep you updated on the process data migration will likely take most of today. Thanks again!

Update 2/24 I initially transferred only a small portion of my data to validate the process before committing to a full migration. After installing the necessary components, I mounted the drive in Windows 11 using Ubuntu via PowerShell with the following command:

wsl --mount \.\PHYSICALDRIVE1 --partition 1

This allowed me to access the drive through File Explorer and complete the initial transfer. While I could have performed this directly within Proxmox, I chose the method I’m more familiar with to avoid potential issues with important media data.

Next, I created a directory in promox and mounted the external drive using:

mount /dev/sdc /mnt/pve/Media

After confirming successful mounting, I updated the configuration files to make the change persistent and verified functionality by restarting the server. I was then able to point my Jellyfin library to the new location and confirm the migrated data was accessible.

With testing complete, I have shut down the Proxmox server and begun transferring the remaining data.

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PancakesCantKillMe 3 points 8 months ago

I mount my W2019 domain data volume with proxmox. I also mount them on any VM in service including Mint, fedora running the Arr stack and Jellyfin. They both mount and read/write to this large ntfs volume (~100TB). The cifs mount works mostly fine, but can be quirky at times. I am planning steps to migrate this data to a native Linux environment and I would think that should be your eventual setup too. It just works better. Start jumping in on Mint and search whenever you are stumped. I can nearly always find an answer in their forums. I suggest Mint as the query nets you cast will return more results than if you load a lesser used distro. Once you get your sea legs, you can play more and explore others. Start loading them up in Proxmox!

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NastyNative 2 points 8 months ago

Thank you for the update. Initially, I considered keeping the drive as NTFS, but after further reading, I've become concerned about potential long-term stability issues when Linux performs frequent writes to NTFS partitions.

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