Many empty playlists

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Server Version#: plexmediaserver-1.25.5.5492-12f6b8c83.x86_64
Player Version#: web. android latest

Long time plex user. I started the plex client on my shop tablet the other day (chrome os), and clicked on a playlist. There was no content. Tried several others, most but not all with zero content. These are playlists I routinely use.

I logged into the server this morning and checked these playlists. Many, but not all, are empty.

Any ideas on why this happened and what can be done to prevent? It will be rather time consuming to recreate all of them.

thanks

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One possible scenario as to what happened:

  • “Empty trash automatically after every scan” is activated
  • The server has (temporarily) lost connection to the media storage and thus has marked all songs/albums as “trashed”. But due to the above server preference, this lead to all media being ousted from the library. Thus all playlists lost their items.
  • Subsequently, the access to the media storage was restored, so the server has added all media back. However, this usually means that all tracks get a new “identity” and thus won’t take their place back in the existing playlists. You should be able to see this when you sort your library by “Date added”.

Why the connection to the media storage was lost, I cannot tell. There are numerous factors which can have an influence here.
In general, if your media storage is anywhere else than inside the Plex server machine, you should disable the above mentioned server preference.

You might be able to restore the content of your playlists, by reverting to one of the database backups: Restore a Database Backed Up via 'Scheduled Tasks' | Plex Support

1 Like
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Thanks. The ‘empty trash’ option was activated. And I did notice, the other day that the list of recently added music started to include content that had been around for years.

I will try the database restore option.

Much appreciated.

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Just a short follow up. I restored the oldest available database files following the directions in the linked support article. Unfortunately it did not help. Of the 35 playlists I have, 9 were completely empty and most of the remainder were only partially populated. The server and all libraries are on the same file system so not sure what wes the trigger.

thank again for the help

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If there are mechanical hard drives involved which are allowed to “spin down” when idle, this can easily happen.
Keep 'em spinning and put the whole server behind a UPS unit.

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