Name: migrate-from-personal-storage-to-bytesized

Last reviewed by: Clipper, April 2026

Migrate from personal storage to Bytesized

Also known as: how to get your personal Plex content onto your Bytesized Appbox.

There are multiple ways to do this. This guide uses rsync with a few tweaks to make the transfer resumable and let you monitor its progress.

Note: If your data is on another seedbox rather than a personal computer or NAS, see Getting data from other seedboxes instead.

⚠️ This involves some Unix/Linux command-line work — please be careful.

Setup

1. Set up an SSH key pair on your local machine.
2. Copy the public key to your Bytesized Appbox by appending it to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.
3. Ensure the SSH private key is loaded in your local environment (e.g. via ssh-agent).
4. From the directory you want to send (e.g. your local Movies folder), run the following loop:

while [ 1 ]
do
    rsync -avhzS --partial-dir=.partials --progress . [email protected]:media/Movies
    sleep 10
done

Replace username and servername with the values from your Appbox dashboard.

Tip: Run this loop inside a screen or tmux session so it keeps running even if you close your terminal.

rsync options explained

• -a — archive mode (preserves permissions, timestamps, symlinks)
• -v — verbose output
• -h — human-readable file sizes
• -z — on-the-fly compression/decompression
• -S — sparse file efficiency
• --partial-dir=.partials — allows rsync to resume partial transfers without resending entire files
• --progress — shows transfer progress per file
• . — current working directory (your local source folder)
• username@servername:media/Movies — destination path on your Appbox

If the rsync is interrupted for any reason, the script will wait 10 seconds and automatically restart. This handles temporary network interruptions or brief server downtime gracefully.