I’m about to do the Plex Dance because I had items with dates in the future and they were stuck. I ran some commands in terminal to find all future dated content in my TV Shows library and had the dates fixed. Here are some questions I have about the Plex Dance.
If I wanted to do it to the whole library, am I better off just removing the library and then re-adding it? The Plex Dance suggestion wants you to remove the impacted items out of the folder and then eventually add them back in. I need to do this to the whole library.
Will this cause the thumbnails, credits and all the other stuff to have to re-download?
If you are wondering, I don’t know how many files exactly were impacted. At least the full amount of items in my recently added section have not changed so I really have no idea how many that is.
I would rather not have to do the downloading of all other content (thumbnails, credits detection, etc.) but if I have to I will. Is there another way?
I would really like a feature in Plex to be able to change the date in the UI. That’s not currently available is it?
Pretty sure I asked about this a few years ago and it’s yes. Something to do with media_parts table being updated which triggers anything danced to be redone.
Ok. I’m assuming your “yes” is answering the question in the title of my post. Thank you.
What about removing library instead of moving files out of the folder? Will that work the same as the plex dance?
I still think this should be a feature in settings. We shouldn’t have to do the plex dance to fix this issue.
The idea of the plex dance is to remove all traces of the media having been added in the first place, so yes, everything will be deleted. It will be added as if it was never added to begin with.
Plex dance is for worst case. You should just scan library + refresh metadata + analyze library. That catches almost all changes to the files. But if the added date is wrong, it probably won’t fix that. If you know what you’re doing, stop plex and open the database. Make sure you have a backup.
My question is, what do you mean future dates? As in the “date_added” is wrong? Was the system date wrong when you added those files? Because I’ve never heard of Plex using the file’s “creation_date” or any date on the file as its added date.
I would usually agree with you that changes to the file shouldn’t require a plex dance. But I’m going to be completely blunt, if you know how databases work, there is no reason why the “date_added” field would/should be updated by any function, so this is a problem (■■■■ up) that you created for yourself. So don’t lay this on Plex.
Lol. This reminds me of “but I said with all due respect…”.
I didn’t do this myself. Just started to happen a few weeks ago. Could have been another issue related to my docker container or something in UnraidOS but it’s not like I did this.
When I realized it was a future date I changed the values using terminal in UnraidOS, but this is the value I changed. (obviously this is good now, but it was a future date before).
With my movies section I did the plex dance with those individual files because there were less than 10. With the shows there were more which is why I’m asking here what my options are.
The only thing I could think that could have caused this was a drive failure in my array that caused me to have to reload my libraries in Plex. Not sure how that happened (I have two parity drives) but it did. My guess is that it started to happen then. Not that the re-loading of libraries by plex messed it up but maybe there was something in UnraidOS that caused the date to be sometime in the future? Or the Plex docker container? Who knows. It is what it is.
Thanks for the previous response. That helped me decide what I will do.
Plex doesn’t use the “last modified” date on your file to determine when it added the media; that would be ludicrous and produce all sorts of problems, lol. It uses the current date on the system. So you’re looking in the wrong place. My guess is that your system date was wrong for some reason and that’s why the last modified date on your file is also in the future, just like the database entries are also in the future.
That most likely means that your server machine doesn’t have a battery buffered real time clock in it. Which then requires it to go out on the network/internet to an ntp server to ask for the current time and date.
If that internet connection was not available at the time when the device (and with it Plex server) was booted up, it would used some kind of “random” date.
If you now added media while it was running with a wrong date/time, then that wrong date would appear as the “Added at” date on your media items.
The cure is either to not allow Plex server to be started until after the first successful time sync, or to add a CMOS battery. (if the hardware allows it, that is. Many NAS devices don’t support a battery buffered real time clock. But if it’s a old PC or server, it might be easily fixable by replacing the existing old battery on the mainboard.)
If you think that it should not have added media to the library around that time anyway, you should disable this checkbox: “Empty trash automatically after every scan”.
Because what might have happended is this:
The media storage was not ready when Plex server tried to access it. This could be due to hard drive being spun down for power saving. Or network connections to a file server not being ready on time.
the above mentioned check box then causes Plex server to oust the affected items from the library.
at a later time, the library is being scanned and the items get added back, becase they were never really gone in the first place. But the items now bear the wrong date, which was held by the machine during the scan.
I see. Thank you for that thorough explanation. I do remember having to replace the cmos battery but this was a different point in time. Perhaps it was a combination of that and then later the drive failure I had.
I know whatever happened was a very rare circumstance so I’m not mad at it. It was a good learning experience and I’m glad I know how to solve for it as well as understand what may have happened to cause this.
