Entire Movie Library Information Disappeared

General Discussions
1

As the title says; the information for my entire movie library disappeared. I looked at it this past Thursday and everything looked fine and even sync some movies and TV shows to my iPad before leaving on a short vacation. I logged into it today and all the movie information, posters, watch history, etc has completely disappeared. All the movies are listed as if the agent was unable to download any information about them. The even weirder part of this is that my TV show library and another used to catalog some adult movies seems unaffected. Thoughts? Any way to recover the information without having to re-scrape the entire folder of 600+ movies?

2

Was/Is the media stored on an external drive?

3

@hthighway said:
Was/Is the media stored on an external drive?

All of the media for all three library’s is stored on an external NAS.

4

With external storage the follow can happen…

  1. You have your media on a external disk/NAS/server that is sometimes not available to Plex server. Depending on where you have them, this could be caused by:
  • disk spinup times from sleep or
  • delayed wakeup of NAS/file servers from sleep or
  • patchy connections due to the use of WiFi between PMS and data storage
  1. Now comes the second circumstance:
    Under Settings - Server - Library - Empty trash automatically after every scan there is a checkmark
    What can happen then is the following:
  • your data storage unit (external hard disk/NAS/ file server) is unavailable. Plex Server does a rescan of its libraries, either because it is scheduled to do so or because it sensed something changed in the file system.
  • PMS recognizes that those files are not available anymore. Due to the preference above, PMS erases the item from its library. At this point all your manual edits to the metadata are lost.
  • Later, the file storage becomes available again, PMS rescans the library and adds the file as if it was new. Thus the video has the standard set of metadata again.

Make sure that Plex has always access to the file storage or disable the preference to automatically empty the trash.

5

So I would guess my options would be to ether disable the empty trash or the automatic rescan?

6

Also the interesting part is that it didn’t download the standard metadata again until I forced a full rescan.