Content of my collections disappeared

General Discussions
1

I have set up over 50 collections for movies (manually).
The collections worked well for a couple of days without any problems. Today most of my collections are empty. Some of them still have some movies in the collection but they are no longer complete. Does anyone know why this happens and what I can do to stop it? This was hours of work to get this how we wanted it and now it all seems to be lost.

2
  • Were they smart collections, using complex (or not) criteria to automatically populate the collection?
  • Can you check the Collections tag on the Tags tab for one movie that was supposed to be in one of these collections? Check to see if the tag is Locked with a yellow padlock icon. If they are not, then maybe the metadata for the movies got refreshed, which will remove any custom metadata (including collection tags) you added to the movies.
3

Hi.
Thank you for responding.

I do not believe they are smart collections. I just made the collection by adding the first film to it and then added the rest.

The movies that have been removed from the collections no longer have the collection tag, which is not locked. Some of the movies still in the collections have the collection tag locked and some don’t.

I suppose my next question is, if I put 100 films into a collection manually, do I have to also go into each one to lock the collection tag or make sure it is locked?

4

The more likely scenario is that Plex temporarily lost some of your files.
This can e.g. happen if you have configured your server to do some automatic/periodic scans and to automatically empty trash after every scan. If your HDD is e.g. slow to spin up during such a scan, Plex will mark the items as gone and delete them. If they’re recognized during a subsequent scan, your manual edits (like collection assignments) will be gone.

If you cannot rule that out, make sure to disable Settings > [Server Name] > Library > Empty trash automatically after every scan.

5

Thank you I will try that and see if it works.

6

You don’t have to lock the collections tag once you add a movie to it. It should happen whenever you edit it in the first place to put the movie into the collection.

Why this happened… sorry, no idea. maybe what tom80H said.

1 Like
7

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.