Thanks for the reply @jep2916
I did that yesterday when you replied and let it run 24 hours. New shows are still duplicating.
I’m gonna keep trying stuff, but I can’t do a PlexDance every day…
I finally found the issue.
I had set up my server to run as a service via NSSM. But it was also starting with windows as normal, so essentially I had two versions of Plex going at the same time. Not sure how that was even possible, but for the time being I have disabled the service until I can find a clean way of setting it up as needed.
In any event, that’s why I had two copies of the same media. Because two versions of plex must have been scanning it.
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I have the same issue. Duplicates started showing up. Driving me nuts.
It is known to happen and, as all see, is annoying. Engineering hasn’t found a way to resolve it other than rebuild the whole DB from scratch.
Kudos. This was the fix for me.
I also noticed two instances of PMS running at the same time a few weeks ago. It was around the time I installed PMS beta to test the new Web Shows release. I’d just assumed beta and prod were supposed to run in parallel and that’s why I was seeing two instances. That’s also when I started seeing lots of dupes on newly added content. Not everything but probably 80% - 90%. Both copies always pointed to the same physical file when viewing info within Plex.
You were exactly right. Two versions of Plex running at the same time, scanning at different intervals, writing metadata twice unless the timing was just so (which explains why a small portion of my new content didn’t show dupes).
I think after installing PMS beta it re-enabled the option or has its own config with that set as default and I just didn’t notice until I started looking into the dupes issue. I also have PMS set to raas via NSSM. After disabling the option to start PMS with user login (in Windows, via right click of the PMS system tray applet) I’m no longer seeing dupes.
Thank you for taking the time to post your solution! You’re a scholar and a gentleman!
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Probably an old post, but if you go to settings → library & click on one of your libraries ex. “Movies”.
You then go to Advanced and on “Collections” you can choose between …
“Off”
“hide items found in collections”
“show collections and their items”
the normal setting is “Show collections and their items” which duplicates movies in that fashion.
Took me some time to find it out myself today. Hope it helps new people who gets the same problem 
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thank you, you made me realised that I was running Plex as a service, so I had to turn off Plex in Startup apps. I was running two versions of PLEX as well. No more double scan.
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Thank you so much, this is exactly what was wrong with my library. I’ve been trying to fix this for months.
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