Why on earth did a recent server update change how libraries pointed to media? For many years, the Server (correctly) pointed to a unique hard drive. Now, however, it points to an actual folder or drive letter.
So I was upgrading one of the Plex storage drives, which resulted in my new drive temporarily having a different drive letter. After I waited for Plex to completely rebuild the libraries, I physically replaced the old drive, changing the drive letter. As a result, I had to completely rebuild all of the libraries AGAIN.
This is seriously stupid design, Plex team. The software correctly pointed to unique drives for many years, preventing this problem, and then it was stupidly changed it to looking at a specific folder. What was the thought process there?
Not sure what you are talking about, Plex uses the defined folder/drive Paths. IE F:\TV or F:\Movies Windows does not have a way to refer to a physical drive. In your case, you have enable automatic scan and empty trash after each scan settings enabled. Prior to your drive rebuild I would have at a minimum disabled the automatic trash emptying, and possibly the automatic scanning, in order to keep the library intact.
Not true at all. Prior to recently, when you pointed a Library, it showed me the serial number of the connected hard drives. The server didn’t care what drive letter was assigned to a drive because it was looking for the serial number. Now it only shows drive letters, so if a physical drive changes letters, you lose your library. Safe to say that this is beyond dumb.
Just mentioning that you won’t lose your library. Plex won’t delete content if a drive is perceived to be offline – that being said, it’ll only pick that library up once you fix the drive letter assignment or assign the new library folder location to the same library.
I literally just did this this afternoon. After the drive changed letters, I had to rebuild the entire library (video thumbnails, etc.). The behavior you describe is not happening for me.
I’m not sure what you are talking about, but you are just plain wrong. For many years, when I have gone to point a library to a location, it showed the drive serial numbers. This only changed very recently. This worked the same on the built-in Plex server for the Nvidia Shield as it did on my Windows 10 server.
I don’t have a screenshot because I’m running the current Plex server version which no longer does this (hence the point of this thread). I’m certainly not going to try to downgrade to an older server version and risk more problems just to prove how Plex behaved for several years.
I’ve never used the Plex server on my Shield so I don’t know if it is different on there, but I have been using Plex on windows and linux for many years and have never seen the behaviour you’re describing. It has always been pointing libraries at folders.
What OS/architecture are you running the server on?
