Long time Plex Pass holder and never needed to post before. I recently moved file storage locations, and followed the usual advice for this. ie. Turn off scanning and trash, add new location with the copied library, allow scanning, remove old location once Plex has resolved the duplicates.
But I found I had lots of duplicates! After a bit of head scratching and investigation I beleive that over the last 10 years various Agents/Scanners have been used across various Plex versions, and I think this has caused Plex not to identify the duplicate.
Here is an example XML for the same title on the different locations.
Old Location
<Video ratingKey=“4” key="/library/metadata/4" guid=“plex://movie/5d77687d7e5fa10020bf080d”
New Location
<Video ratingKey=“12358” key="/library/metadata/12358" guid=“plex://movie/5d77687d7e5fa10020bf080d”
I thought I could clear the metadata via a forced scan to regenerate but it seems it does not refresh or update older titles.
I know I can recreate the library and rescan the lot, but I want to retain the Date Added and Watched stats.
I have read many similar posts, for example Plex detecting same Movie as a duplicate movie in the same library - #3 by thirdgen89gta
Is there anyway to force the library to rescan using a single agent? My thought here is if I force the refresh of all the titles using one agent it woudl replace any older titles scanned with an earlier legacy scanner, then when I move file locations it woudl better identify the duplicate.
Sorry for the long post, I had not expected to get into this level of detail to be honest, I thought Plex woudl be able to manage its own backward compatability.
All help appreciated.
CC