I’ve recently turned on Sonic Analysis for my music library to use in conjunction with Plex and Plexamp. I’ve also noticed that I’ve lost a TON of space on the drive where Plex lives, and the metadata that’s also stored there. The Plex website often attributes large losses in data to thumbnail generation, but I’ve NEVER had that option turned on.
I can only assume it’s because of my extensive music library. How can I get that space back? I’d rather remove the sonic analysis and get the space back, or figure out if it’s broken and there’s redundant information eating up unnecessary space. It shouldn’t take over 1TB of drive space to build sonic maps of songs that barely take up half that amount.
I’ve seen reddit forums discussing that you need to allow Plex to empty the trash after scans are done, which I do. I was hoping once all analysis is done, it would automatically remove old redundant files, but it hasn’t.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Server Version#: Version 1.32.2.7100
Player Version#: Version 4.107.2
How many tracks in your music library?
I don’t think it is the Sonic Analysis data, but I HAVE seen an older version of the server fail to clean up the Sonic Analysis transcoder temporary files. See if you have a bunch of wav files hanging around.
I definitely don’t have any wav files in my library, but wondering if you mean the sonic analysis converts them to wav to scan them. Is that what you meant?
Where can I check the directory where temp files are stored for Sonic Analysis on a QNAP (linux) device?
I have 38,269 tracks in my music library across 2,967 albums
Yes.
I don’t remember where the transcoder keeps its temporary files, can you use the QNAP UI to search for *.wav files? This is not likely… but it’s worth checking.
Here’s another possibility. If you have your PMS set to do database backups… On my Ubuntu system, these do NOT get cleaned up properly. Look in /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Databases and see if you have loads of -tmp files.
Anyway with only 38k tracks in your library, you do not have 1 TB of associated music metadata. Something else is going on.
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Another directory to look out for is ./Cache/PhotoTranscoder in the Plex data directory. It can grow quite large on some systems.
Try running something like du -hcd 1 in the top-level Plex data directory. It should provide a summary similar to the following (note the relatively large size of the Cache directory; this is just a test server with very little content/activity):
Also in the ./Cache directory is a sub-directory named Transcode. If you didn’t configure a custom transcode directory for your server you could see some files being created here during transcoding sessions or for detection activities.
So looks like my backups are about 2TB each. Not ideal, but nowhere near the 1TB I’ve basically lost over the past 2 weeks.
There’s a ton of images in there, but i can’t see how big. I’m terrible with Putty. I use Filezilla, but it won’t show me total size. What are all those images? This isn’t where it stores posters, image previews, etc., is it? Could I delete those?
That directory looks fine, there are no old temporary files.
QNAP has a global recycle bin.
Is it possible it’s grabbed the space ?
Would I empty that using QBoost?
Otherwise the Recycle Bin folders in each drive are empty.
If it’s not my music, I wonder if the system has generated new skip intro data into my system and not overwritten the old data? I recently moved around a large amount of data to a new drive (~12TB), and had to remap a lot of my library, but none of the media ended up being viewed as something that was newly added. I was able to reassociate all of the media by turning off emptying the trash and scanning the library again. I think at most maybe 2 movies popped up as brand new that weren’t. Only other thing I can think of.
Thumbnails / Chapter index images ?
By default, these are created.
Skip Intro & Credit detection , while using a lot of temporary image files, result in a single record in the database ( byte offset from the beginning of the file )
So now that I’ve turned off Sonic Analysis, I’m no longer noticing space being eaten away. Wondering how I can purge my sonic analysis files to get that all back.
If it really was Sonic Analysis at fault then it must be temporary files from the transcoder. The end results of Sonic Analysis are numbers in the database, it does not take a lot of storage space. Unfortunately I do not remember the path where the temp wav files are stored on Linux, maybe someone else does.
- Create the “PlexData” shared folder (exact capitals as shown).
- Restart PMS.
- You’ll now have FileStation access into where the Plex internal files are stored.
Start poking around here. You’ll find them (I don’t use music in PMS)
When I try to make that folder, it simply won’t let me do it.
It won’t let you???
Are you signed in with Administrator privilege ?
“PlexData” is a dummy shared folder.
It looks like every other shared folder on QTS.
The only thing special about it is Plex looks for that specific name when it starts.
Ah, I shut down my admin account because I was getting DDOS attacks. I set my current user to have admin priveleges but I’ll try on the actual admin one.
DDOS attack? NEVER open the SSH port to the internet.
I have my machine locked off from inbound traffic and use admin .
Alternative:
SSH into the box
sudo to root
‘addshare’ (a command line tool qnap provides)
It’s stopped now. I didn’t even touch the SSH settings. They just started out of nowhere. In any case, the PlexData folder wouldnt work even on the admin user. I’ll try remoting in directly. Hope I can find where all the data went.
