Server Version#: 1.13.8.5395
Player Version#: N/A
Sometime this morning, the “updatedAt” value for the majority of my video files changed to a value from today. I’ve had this happen with a small number of files once or twice in the past where the “updatedAt” value showed a time in the future, and I was able to directly edit the sqlite DB to set the “updatedAt” value on the affected files to match the “addedAt” value, which worked pretty well to get them “unstuck” from my Recently Added list. But that was when I had a half dozen or so affected files, currently I’m dealing with hundreds of affected files and instead of showing a value in the future, they’re showing a value from earlier today.
What events would cause the “updatedAt” value to change inside the Plex XML metadata? Hopefully an answer to that question that will let me figure out why this occurred and how I can prevent it in the future.
For what it’s worth:
- I was not using Plex (or even the computer that PMS runs on) when the mass updatedAt change occurred.
- As far as I can tell, my NAS didn’t lose connection to the host running PMS – no power or network outages, etc (plus, my NAS losing connection or its volume getting unmounted has never caused problems in the past).
- All of the modified times/mtimes on my media files have stayed the same. I’m seeing files with mtimes from 2015 showing “updatedAt” values from 2 hours ago.
- It looks like all poster/cast/etc metadata was lost for the affected files. The media agents correctly replaced them but when I first noticed something was wrong, a lot of the affected files still didn’t have posters and were still getting populated.
- Watched/Unwatched status does appear to have been retained on the affected files.
- My files were not affected uniformly across libraries: about 90% of files in my Shows library were affected, about 80% of my Movies, about 50% of my Documentaries, about 40% of my Shorts, and 0% of my Music.
- To reiterate the above point: In each affected library, there were at least some files that were NOT affected despite being in the same top-level folder on my NAS (i.e. while 80% of my Movies now show as Recently Added, 20% DO NOT show as recently added and retain their correct “updatedAt” value despite living in the same /Volumes/Movies directory as the affected files). This would all make more sense to me if 100% of the files in a library were affected but a seemingly random subset of files within a library being affected seems really weird.
I’m running the newest stable PMS on MacOS High Sierra. My media lives on a Synology NAS that is volume mounted to the Mac. This has all been working fine for years…
So, what are the conditions that would cause the “updatedAt” value to change under normal conditions? What would cause “updatedAt” to change en masse? How can I fix this? How can I prevent this from happening again?
