A couple months ago, I had my main terabyte drive start dying in my Plex box so I had to replace it. This involved spending hours copying my PlexDB folder to a new drive. This week, I’m replacing that box completely and here I am again, waiting 2 hours now while hundreds of thousands of individual files transfer.
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Are there any plans in Plex’s future to redesign the ‘database’ and maybe have it be one or just a couple self-contained files (like some form of SQL database or something?) vs the many thousands of tiny files that take absolutely forever to transfer?
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Seperate question in my quest to get that folder smaller … can you look into having an option in the settings where we could actually disable (and delete existing) thumbnails in Grid or Summary View for individual episodes for TV shows? I’m currently using List View but those images still exist. The images for the shows themselves and the season folders are great but having so many images saved in that database folder that I’m not going to look at anyway? I’d love to reclaim that drive space, and then it’s our decision if we want to re-download those images if we switch back to Grid instead of List.
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Last thing I just noticed … the \Updates folder apparently doesn’t clean up during Maintenance cycles or Empty Trash commands. I have 29 installers backed up in there, that’s 2GB alone that shouldn’t be required after the update is installed and working. At least the older one can be purged once the new one comes out … Right?
Thank you for your time, I love this product, it was the first time I actually made a real media server instead of just using file shares. Would really love to see it not require such a huge footprint (if not size at least file count) if it has a way to be managed differently. Have a good night!!
@juunidesu said:
- A couple months ago, I had my main terabyte drive start dying in my Plex box so I had to replace it. This involved spending hours copying my PlexDB folder to a new drive. This week, I’m replacing that box completely and here I am again, waiting 2 hours now while hundreds of thousands of individual files transfer.
You are not alone.
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/305083/too-many-movie-posters/p1
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/304813/extremely-many-files-in-plexdata/p1 ← PlexPass Only which is too bad. Anyway, it talks about multiple copies of the same poster being download to your hard drive. This also includes posters in multiple languages.
- Are there any plans in Plex’s future to redesign the ‘database’ and maybe have it be one or just a couple self-contained files (like some form of SQL database or something?) vs the many thousands of tiny files that take absolutely forever to transfer?
Probably not as PLEX sees this as okay. You can reduce the amount by disabling Generate video preview thumbnails and Generate chapter thumbnails
- Seperate question in my quest to get that folder smaller … can you look into having an option in the settings where we could actually disable (and delete existing) thumbnails in Grid or Summary View for individual episodes for TV shows? I’m currently using List View but those images still exist. The images for the shows themselves and the season folders are great but having so many images saved in that database folder that I’m not going to look at anyway? I’d love to reclaim that drive space, and then it’s our decision if we want to re-download those images if we switch back to Grid instead of List.
Probably not as PLEX sees this as okay.
- Last thing I just noticed … the \Updates folder apparently doesn’t clean up during Maintenance cycles or Empty Trash commands. I have 29 installers backed up in there, that’s 2GB alone that shouldn’t be required after the update is installed and working. At least the older one can be purged once the new one comes out … Right?
That’s odd. The newer versions of PLEX should be keeping only 3 previous versions and deleting the rest.
Maybe PLEX will only delete the previous versions from the date the feature was implemented.
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1467288/#Comment_1467288
- (Butler) Clean up previous updaters during maintenance. PMS will keep the previous three updates (#4510)
Also, Empty Trash is not for Setup/Updates… It’s for removing items from your libraries. If you ever notice a trash bin on one of your movie/shows? Empty Trash will delete that item from the list and your library.
Thanks for the info so far … I do have the generate chapter thumbnails set to never … if that’s the individual episode ones and not the season ‘folders’ … can I tell it to somehow erase the ones it already did? or is that like a rebuild the entire database type of thing?
After deleting all the old updates, I’m not immediately hurting for space now. But I have my DB on a 16GB SSD (to keep it silent and keep those files away from my OS and any media needing defragging) so guessing I’ll eventually become concerned about this again as I add more media over time.
@juunidesu said:
Thanks for the info so far … I do have the generate chapter thumbnails set to never … if that’s the individual episode ones and not the season ‘folders’ … can I tell it to somehow erase the ones it already did? or is that like a rebuild the entire database type of thing?
There is an option to delete video preview thumbnails.
I’m not sure about chapter thumbnails though…
