The past couple of months have got me a bit worried about the reliability of my home PC. I have had two hard drives fail me since I first got my PC all those years ago. Hard drives fail, often for no reason at all, which begs for a backup system to be put in place. The meaning of backup in this circumstance is not to backup the actual original media, but rather to backup the titles of the movies and series that I have.

The reason being that in the case that I lose a hard drive, I would have no idea what was on there and wouldn’t know what to get back.

There’s a lovely little tool that can be added onto Plex, with the name of ExportTools, which can periodically make backups (either csv, XLSX) of the names of the titles listed on the Plex server.

I am currently backing up these files to my Google Drive folder, just for simplicity.

Out of interest, I created a Python script to extract the names of movies and shows that are listed in these backup files. Here is the script:

import pandas as pd

movieFileName = 'Moviescsv'
movieData = pd.read_csv(movieFileName)

movieTitles = movieData['Title']

movieTitles.to_csv('movieTitles.csv', index=False)

showFileName = 'TVShows.csv'
showData = pd.read_csv(showFileName)

showTitles = showData['Series Title'].drop_duplicates()

showTitles.to_csv('showTitles.csv', index=False)

The aim of this script is to extract just the title of the movies and shows, and remove duplicates. This script can be found in a repository that I created in order to hold a number of different media tools and scripts for backups and things for Plex.

Watched Media Side Note

Is there something like this for Netflix? Surely Netflix keeps records of this kind of stuff, purely based on the fact that they are able to keep track of how far you are in watching episodes/movies and it also knows what you have watched and gives you recommendations based on these. I believe it would be interesting to see what I have watched over the years on Netflix, maybe a bit scary, but still interesting.