Hi,
For some time, my Plex server has been showing the red trash can icon over a couple tv shows. I had to google what this means since it is not clear. It sounds like it means some media files were detected as missing (on disk) and next time you empty the library’s trash, they will be removed from plex’s UI.
Like I mentioned, the icons have been appearing for some time and since I was still able to play back everything I wanted to I largely ignored it. It seemed buggy anyway; some top level shows were marked and if I clicked into them, no child items were marked. Though some would have a single season marked, but no items marked within the season.
I updated plex to the latest version at present and decided to finally deal with them. For every single show/season/episode with a mark I checked my files on disk. Is the file there? Is the file readable by plex? Can I play the file in VLC? Basic stuff that assured me plex would have no trouble accessing the media. In fact, I even play a couple items that were within a marked season but didn’t have the delete mark on the individual episode. So I kicked off another library scan, waited, and emptied the trash.
When I emptied the trash for my library it removed dozens of items that not only were present on disk (I was able to play them earlier) but were also not marked as trash. I immediately triggered another library scan and every single item that had been removed was slowly restored, like a normal library scan for new media. They didn’t have metadata or watched/unwatched markers saved from before, which is unfortunate.
So, it seems like the library scanner / trash emptier is a little too aggressive. To be fair, it’s entirely possible, likely even, that I had media items missing during scheduled scans in the past, but at the time I observed this bug everything was OK. Maybe items that reappear on disk aren’t being properly un-trashed?
Hope this can be looked into!
