Last week both mirrored disks in my ReadyNAS Duo failed, taking with them the bulk of my Plex media. Our main concern is the loss of photos and home videos - especially the ones relating our daughters first year of life. Naively thinking that mirrored HDDs would protect us from all but a catastrophe, we regularly moved photos from cameras, phones and tablets to them in order to create space for more.
Whilst most of the source images are almost certainly lost, my (Windows) install of Plex does thankfully still have thumbnail images stored in the AppData folder structure. However these are all cryptically named and seemingly consolidated with thumbnail images from the other media on my server.
Is there any scripted way by which I could copy these thumbnail images, the ones specifically in the Photos library on Plex, into a folder structure that mimics the missing photos? E.g. from /AppData/local/Plex media server/etc/ to Photos/2010-19/2016/
If you take out the drives, you might be able to use testdisk/photorec to recover images.
Already tried that thanks. I’ve used DiskInternals Linux Reader (20hrs to scan then another ~8hrs to build the folder structure before I can attempt to selectively recover the missing files). Whilst this allowed some recovery, many files/folders appear to be corrupt. Most annoying is the fact that the vast majority of our baby photos and home videos are amongst them. I’ve also ordered a USB to SATA cable to see whether connecting the HDD to a Linux laptop will yield any better results but not optimistic.
EDIT: I will take a look at the testdisk/photorec software you suggested though. A lot depends on whether the software is able to see the HDD when it is connected to my Sharkoon HDD Dock. Windows didn’t see it whereas the DiskInternals Linux Reader application did.
I think that in many cases the Plex thumbnails represent the only remaining versions of these missing photos. I’m therefore hoping that it might be possible to make use of these (thumb1.jpg) images in a meaningful way. The Plex database knows (a) where the source file was, (b) where the thumbnail is and © which library. If I knew how to extract this information from the Plex database it would be a trivial task to script the copy of files to a folder structure. From what I can determine it looks like Plex stores this information in a proprietary format thus beyond what I can achieve without help…
In case anyone else experiences a similar problem/requirement I just stumbled across https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/2ifo7u/plex_database_query/ and can now view the Plex database. Looks to be (hopefully) fairly straightforward to obtain what I need using the library_sections, media_items, metadata_items and directories tables.
