I’ve had this happen a couple of times and I’d like to understand what’s happening. I’m not using the force refresh from the menu so I wanted to be sure that I’ve communicated that piece.
I’m adding a new hard drive and because of that, I need to move some of my alphabetical folders to the new HDD. In order to try to not lose all my work, I left everything in place, copied the folders needed to the new HDD. Then I added the new location to my Movies library and let it find everything. The only thing is rather than simply matching everything up as it should, it lost many, many hours of work and basically started matching things up from scratch. I cannot understand why it would have lost all my previous metadata clean up work. But it did. I’ve spend the last two days straight trying to clean it all up again. Then once it’s complete, I plan to delete the old location from the library and then delete the folders from that location. But I still want to understand what happened to cause me to lose my previous work. My current library location was temporarily unavailable (seems to have been due to an issue with my USB hub) and I have my library set so that I don’t lose the locations when something becomes unavailable for exactly this reason. Nonetheless, I lost all that work even though it didn’t delete all the library entries.
Thanks in advance! Looking forward to learning what might be happening.
Please tell us what OS flavor you’re running and some details about your configuration: What’s was versus what is.
It’s entirely possible, but uncertain until we know more, that your data is still there. At minimum, if you had backups enabled in Settings - Server - Extras, you will have a database backup to recover the bulk of your work from.
@raevengel said:
it lost many, many hours of work and basically started matching things up from scratch.
How so? Did you have content that you manually made changes to? I can tell you from my little hiccups that plex will not know the ‘new’ media being added should be treated the same as the old and to keep all the manual metadata…
It’s a Windows 10 PMS on a core i7 unit with 16gb RAM. It’s running the latest version of PMS as I’ve just checked for new versions and there aren’t any. I’ve literally changed nothing with the Plex server on my end.
However, when it added the “new” media (which again, isn’t new but rather a copy of what was already there) instead of adding to what was there it complete lost the matching for media that had long since been matched and posters individually chosen. I lost all my chosen poster art, and many, many items became “unmatched” in the process. Another thing that happened was that some items that were correctly matched but didn’t have poster art available (and that I had gone in and individually added these posters to my media’s metadata), these lost all of the hand-added posters and just used a piece of the video’s screenshot. I’ve had to go through everything with a fine tooth comb and it’s literally taken me two days to work on and it’s still not complete.
Since this isn’t the first time I’ve had to switch the location of media, I knew not to delete the locations that were there until the new media location were fully added to the server. But this didn’t work for me at all. Somehow, it lost most all of the work that I did last time I had to change the HDD names (and I lost a bunch of metadata work then too but partially because I didn’t fully understand how to leave previous media in place until the new stuff was matched up). It’s was truly saddening to have lost all that work again and not due to my own fault. In fact, I still cannot fathom why this would be the case. I didn’t do a force refresh of what was already there. It was just a normal search for newly added media. Yet many items lost everything.
I’d really love to learn what might have happened. If you need more info from me, please let me know.
Yep… I got many T-Shirts…
This is the reason why I’m a big fan of having a custom config(xml or whatnot) that way your setting for anything can be saved with the media. If you move the media, the config file with all the setting/artwork/etc… moves with it.
Disable Emptying of Trash after Library updates (Settings - Server - Library)
With PMS shutdown, Copy the media to its new home
Start PMS (nothing’s changed at this point)
For each Library section:
Edit each individual Library and add the new location. Do not delete the old location yet.
Update that library.
You will see PMS start putting the duplicate count ‘2’ on your media. This is what you need & want to see
Once you see duplicates everywhere, now you can remove the old locations:
Again, for each library section
Edit the library section
Delete the old location from the folder list
Save the changes
Update that Library section
Watch as PMS takes the ‘2’ off each item.
When all is done, Update your entire Library, Empty the trash and clean the bundles.
Now you may re-enable “Empty trash” in Settings - Server - Library
If you get out of sync, and PMS doesn’t have a location to tie the metadata to, the database pointer to the metadata is flagged as ‘no longer needed’. This is what deletes it.
I have. The last time I installed it I did not notice an option to import the CSV back to plex. It just exports and that’s all. I even made a program to export but stopped development for reasons I can’t remember.I suppose if I get pissed off enough I’ll make a program that will import custom setting back into plex’s database. A crap ton of variables I would need to consider before I even start.
I spend three days straight trying to clean up my Plex server after moving/adding the media. I followed the procedure listed above, more or less. I didn’t delete anything, I added the files, I added the new location, I waited to it to add the new location (adding the “2” in the corner as expected). Only it didn’t work that way, did it. For some reason, Plex, in its infinite wisdom lost all the manual edits I had made to my metadata and switched out all the posters which I had painstaking chosen and cleaned up one-by-one.
Now, after spending three days straight fixing things again - Plex HAS LOST MY FIXES AGAIN! What is happening?
I’m thinking it’s the new Plex Movie Metadata scraper. I can’t prefer TMDB and the Plex scraper cannot find movies that are easily found and matched via TMDB. It’s really rather frustrating. I seriously cannot believe that it’s lost all my chosen posters - again only hours after finally finishing cleaning them up again. I almost never get upset at Plex as I feel the devs do an awesome job. But I’m just so frustrated about losing all my work multiple times and now knowing why. Any help would be truly appreciated.
The only thing I can offer as help is, well maybe, you can use one of the backup databases Plex keeps.
As long as all the old folders are still there you should be okay, I hope. And then you can go from there…
Oh, on a side note. A little FYI that might help you next time. Whenever I use different poster artwork(movie, main tv show, season xxx, individual episode) I download the pictures and have it with the media. That way if I need to recreate my database I’ll have all the custom artwork already and Plex loads it up and I don’t have to select it manually.
