While this will not help with your current problem I would like to suggest at least redundancy for your library. While a true backup is mostly better a good reliable redundant setup would be a great help.
My personal favorite tool for this is StableBit’s DrivePool. If your library is small enough you can just get two drives make a pool out of them and set up file duplication for your library to get the redundancy you need. Drives are cheap and, with that setup, you do not have any downtime if just one drive fails.
Once you have created a pool of two or more drives and turned on duplication you just need to put your files in a series of directories inside the pool and point Plex to those directories and, should another drive fail, DrivePool will simply switch the usage to the good drive and, at most, you will need to restart Plex.
After getting a new drive you just hook it up and DrivePool will move the files around to balance the load. Also, DrivePool will insure that the duplicated files will always reside on different drives.
Another advantage to DrivePool is that all files stored on the drives are in a “standard” format so that, even without access to DrivePool at all, you can access the files as needed.
I have used DrivePool for many years and I am up to needing 13 drives that range from 3tb to 10tb. I have had two drives die to be replaced by larger drives) and I have lost nothing and removing the defective drive(s) from the pool and adding the new drive(s) took lees time that it takes to watch the typical Road Runner cartoon.
I am not saying that DrivePool solves all the library storage problems but it does solve many.
If you do go with DrivePool one warning: Do NOT ever put the Plex database inside the pool. For some reason that will work for a short time and then fail with database errors and a corrupted database. I suspect that any other problem that uses a database like Plex does will also have issues if the database is in the pool.
I just use the pool for the audio, video and some support files.
Lastly if you are often adding to the library it is well to remember this data center axiom:
“Data grows to fill available space”
You need to make drive purchases that takes growth into account. My Plex database started just a few years back at less than 1.5 TB and it is now well over 40tb. I have finally gotten all my older media and the media I inherited form an uncle ripped and placed in my library so, hopefully, my library will not grow so fast.
There are other solutions that work about as well as DrivePool but most of them do not have the advantages of DrivePool and some are quite expensive in the hardware department.
Just do some investigating before you simply replace the failed drive. Remember that hard drives are cheap and time is valuable so an investment in redundancy, and backups if possible, is a good one as it saves a lot of time if there is ever a failure.
I also have an automated task that will produce a text file of all my files. I set up a task, under Windows that runs this command on my media libraries:
dir *.avi *.mkv *.mp4 *.m4v *.mov *.mpg *.mpeg *.wmv *.vob *.ts *.flv *.mp3 *.flac /s > MediaFiles.txt
I then, in the same task, move the files created to a “safe” directory not in the pool.
I have another task that takes those files and archives them with the date and time added to the filename.
This got rather long (sorry) but DrivePool is one of the very few pieces of software that has been well worth the fee and I really like it. BTW: There is a trial period and the tech support from StableBit is some of the best I have found.
