I am a new Plex user. I am dismayed that no actual technical support appears to exist for Plex. Forums don’t really substitute. I have hundreds of TV shows located in a library. Every night at about 2:00 AM many of them, at least a hundred, are deleted. I saw a thread here suggesting that Plex doesn’t differentiate between DVR libraries and regular libraries, and that anything I set to record as a series might be deleted by Plex. I removed most of my series record in the DVR and set everything to NEVER delete, yet the shows keep getting deleted. Luckily the first time it happened I had a large enough recycle bin to recover them all. After that I copied them to another location Plex doesn’t know about. Each day I have been copying them back after Plex deletes them. How do I stop this? These shows plex deletes are ones that I used to have a series record set up for, but don’t now. It hasn’t messed with the 1000 movies I have in other libraries.
Go into the properties of each of these shows and make sure that the episode retention is set to ‘Keep all episodes’ and ‘never delete’ anything.
There are no settings. I deleted their listings under Recording Priority. Yet they still get deleted. Keep in mind that the the shows being deleted weren’t recorded using the DVR, they were copied from DVD sets I have.
Unfortunately the DVR retention settings apply to the show, not where it came from or what library it resides in. I learned this lesson the hard way, assuming I’d only be recording and keeping 5 episodes of The Big Bang Theory… only to find my back library of episodes kept disappearing in the nightly purge.
Reload your shows (hopefully you have a backup), and double check the settings Otto has pointed out.
These settings exist for every single tv show you have in your Plex library.
Also to note, that if you delete the recordings from the Recordings area, the settings are STILL applied to the show. You will have to manually change them.
This is why you shouldn’t give applications permission to even delete your files.
I solve this under Linux by giving Plex write permission to my movie and TV directories. But, that’s all. Plex is able to write to the directory for DVR content, but the rest of the files in the directories have a different set of permissions and Plex is only able to read it for playback. The DVR content can be deleted, but that’s how I want it.
Do you mean I need to re-create the series record, change it to NEVER and then delete the series record?
No, you just add the files back into a regular Plex tv show library.
After Plex has scanned and matched the items, you edit each series at its top level and set the options as shown in my screen shot.
Actually, there are two places these settings reside:
- In the Series Record settings through the DVR
- In the properties for the show itself (no matter where the show lives, you can get to these settings)
To be safe, I always change both… but I think the second is the most important one.
Odd… one place to initially set it, but two to double check…
These are actually the same settings, just presented in two different dialogs.
AFAIK it is sufficient to change it in one place.
I’ve found if I only change the settings in the DVR area, that they do not carry through to the other area. Got burned by that once, unless there’s been a recent change?
I think I finally found the settings for each folder in the library settings and changed a few to keep all and never delete. Hopefully it sticks. I will know tomorrow morning. I would like to manage this with file system rights, but as far as I can tell Plex runs under logged in user rights so changes I made there would affect me as well. I wish I could get Plex to run as Service. For what seems on the surface to be a great product, this has some “features/bugs” that are really challenging.
Even so, there is no need to recreate the recording job if the tv show currently only exists as a regular Plex tv show.
You can, but you will lose hardware decoding support.
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