I have a 25gb metadata folder for a 2tb library which i feel is very excessive and leaving me with little space on my 60gb ssd. I dont have any media index files but what i do see is that plex creates a _combined folder in the metadata folder that just seems to be a duplicate of the files in the agent folder. Can this be stopped? Plex uses a crazy amount of metadata compared to kodi. I don’t want 20 different posters for a film etc.
You can turn off a lot of the extras in Settings - Server. Also, you can do what most of us do which is relocate the metadata directory off the SSD. Have you considered upgrading to a more current capacity SSD in the 250 - 500 - 1TB size?
I know there are other options but my issue is why does it need to be so large in the first place that has to drive people to change location or upgrade their ssd. Its a real bugbear for me with plex.
That 25gb looks like it would be halved if that combined folder was not used or replaced the agent folders and thats not even taking into account the excessive amount of fanart etc
please show me what you mean specifically. I have 25TB of media (35,000+ files) and my metadata directory is only 18GB.
I have about 6,000 files. Attached photo from treefilesize shows how excessive the metadata is.
I think, if you go into _combined (I’m not a linux guy), you’ll find “.BIF” files. Those are some of the extras you can turn off in Settings. Yes, they are HUGE.
I’ve asked some of the Windows Ninjas to look in and help here too.
I’ve followed guides regarding media index files and disabled the necessary settings previously. The files dont have an extension. Searching .bif finds no files.
Just had some other ninjas look in on your screen capture. _combined is actually a link out to the other files. They’ve also asked if you would please open up (expand) those other folders which you’ve not yet opened so we can see what’s in them. It’s clear that something’s wrong and there’s a bunch of us here trying to figure it out.
Do you have Chapter Index / images turned on? Those are the huge consumer of space i mentioned.
From what I’ve read, the single thing that causes Plex to use huge amounts of disk space is when you’ve enabled video preview thumbnails in your Movie libraries.
Even if you turned off the generation of new index files, there still might be some already there before you turned it off.
Edit your tv show library, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab and clear the checkbox ‘Enable video preview thumbnails’ there as well. Then press the red button below it ‘Delete Preview thumbnails’
(you might wanna close all the explorer windows which have the metadata folders open first, just to make sure there are no weird file locks active)
Have cleared out those and made no difference. Windows isn’t seeing the _combined folder as link as you will see from the second screenshot the total size of the content folder shown is 825.6 while the _combined folder is 412.3 and thetvdb agent folder at bottom is 408.6. Nearly all the files seem to be duplicated except that the ones in the combined folder have com.plex.agents.thetvdb in front of the file name.
Windows seems to think that the files in the combined folder have a extension that starts with .thetvdb_* part of the filename while the ones in the thetvdb agent folder have no extension.
The ‘combined’ folder consists mainly of symbolic links to the other folders.
Neither Windows Explorer nor your software are even aware of Symbolic Links and therefore give you a wrong impression of the space consumed.
(‘Symbolic Links’ are not what you might know as a file ‘Shortcut’ [which is a small file with the filename extension .lnk])
Well whether there symbolic links or not, windows seems to think that space is being used which cant be good thing.
As i test i removed a file from _combined folder and opened the equivalent in the thetvdb agent folder and vice versa. In both cases the file opened, so thats telling me there is no link?
@7moonjanx7 said:
As i test i removed a file from _combined folder and opened the equivalent in the thetvdb agent folder and vice versa. In both cases the file opened, so thats telling me there is no link?
The test is not conclusive, as Symlinks don’t work like that. The file data are retained until both/all references are erased. They are modeled to work exactly like Symlinks in the Unix world.
Thanks Trumpy81, i’ve these options numerous times in recent days and they made no difference. This is a new plex pc setup from April. I’ll probably restart library again but i’m not going down the route of spending more money because plex is looking for more space than it should.
