Hi there! I have been using Plex about a year, but have suffered a complete meltdown tonight. I am not savvy in the tech behind Plex, and I’m in desperate need of help.
It all started a few hours ago when I launched Plex on my Mac laptop running Big Sur to change poster art. It said it could not connect to my library on my Synology NAS. I’ve never received this error message before. However, when I turned on the Apple TV, my entire library was there and connected. I went back into my Mac, and then somehow I managed to lose any connection to the library. It acted like it never existed, and asks me to add media. It’s still all there on my AppleTV, but not on my Mac or on the NAS (all the actual media is fine). After a million attempts, I uninstalled Plex totally from my Mac.
I tried to reinstall the Plex for Mac app and used the Library/Application Support/Plex folder from Time Machine to restore settings. That got me back to the original problem, it said it could not connect to my library on my Synology NAS. But as soon as I signed into my account on the Plex Media Server on my NAS, on both the Mac and NAS again the library disappeared, and all my restored files in Library/Application Support/Plex folder seemed to be overwritten. Again, it’s still somehow working on the Apple TV, but I’m terrified that’s all going to disappear too.
As a side note, this led me to a bigger question… I have no idea what is actually running the Plex Media Server. It’s on my NAS, but I’ve never used it from there, I’ve always changed any metadata from the Plex for Mac app on my laptop. So not only do I not know how to reconnect everything, I’m not even sure which device is running the show. It has to be the NAS right? I don’t have the Plex Media Server app installed anywhere else. Am I able to control metadata from the Plex for Mac app? Did I actually set this all up wrong? But it worked for 6 months!
My fear is if I try to manually add back libraries on my laptop, I’m going to wipe out metadata, because any new sign-in seems to wipe it out. Does that even make sense? Why is signing into my PLex account a destructive act? Is that even what’s doing it? UGH… Any help for a desperately confused user would be greatly appreciated.
