This has me a bit confused (apologies)
Are you mounting a share from another NAS which itself is a mount from yet another NAS?
(I must be reading it wrong)
Sorry. I can explain it better.
Q8 has a share called Multimedia. Inside Multimedia there are two folders: TV and Movies. The q8movies folder mounted Multimedia/Movies. The q8tv folder mounted Multimedia/TV.
Q has a share with Movies.
SYN has two shares: TV and Music.
I have two movie directories added as libraries to Movies, two TV directories added as libraries to TV, and the one music directory as the library for Music.
I do not have any NAS devices mounting other NAS devices. All the NAS devices mount to the Plex server.
Does that help explain it better?
That helps a lot. While not entirely clear, I have a better idea
- You have a QNAP and a Synology
(so do I) - The Syno has two shared folders: TV and Music
- The QNAP has ONE shared folder (Multimedia) with two subfolders.
Therefore, I think you have:
QNAP → Multimedia/TV and Multimedia/Movies
Syno → TV and Music
The common problems are:
- Using “Multimedia” from QNAP does not work correctly with Plex.
It’s a software-created virual shared folder. Multimedia is intended to be used only with QNAP applications - The moment you install QNAP’s “Codex Pack”, EVERYTHING goes Wonky!
Here is some info we’ve posted in the forum to make life easier.
Q14: Where should I put my medias?
It’s not important, as long as you DO NOT use the default shares from QNAP, like “Multimedia” etc, since they also are used with some QNAP bundled applications, that creates files and directories, that confuse the Plex scanners. If you however decide to go with that directory, we urge you to look for hidden directories and files in it, and add an exclusion for those by using PlexIgnore functionallity.
And to create a shared folder just for Plex Medias, follow this guide and remember to grant full rights to your self, so you can add new items there.
On QNAP, make regular shared folders, putting your media files there, just like you do on Synology and everything will work (enable NFS for each shared folder)
How do I recommend proceeding?
Presuming you have a Syno and QNAP (BIG IF here — hehe)
- Create a Movies shared folder on QNAP
- Move all the movies to the new Movies shared folder
- Create a TV shared folder
- Move all the tv series to the new TV shared folder.
(( If you’re like me when I started, my disks were small. I ended up with ‘movies’ and ‘movies2’. I also ended up with ‘tv’, ‘tv2’, ‘tv3’, and ‘tv4’. This is OK ))
With everything separated cleanly on the NAS boxes, we can get to work.
I recommend:
/syno/music
/syno/tv
/qnap/movies
/qnap/tv
You set the permissions for each.
Now you write the /etc/fstab entries to mount them individually.
With the media now cleanly on the host (we can browse everything from Linux),
we create the container.
This is where it gets simple:
\ # Add the volume which gets everything from the qnap and syno
-v /qnap:/qnap \
-v /syno:/syno \
Inside the container, we can drill down into each
We only needed two passthroughs to make it work.
What do you think?
Did I understand correctly?
That’s close. I have two qnap systems and a synology system.
I turned off all the Multimedia features on the qnap to help solve the problems you brought up about thumbnail generation and the like.
Yes, that all makes sense. That’s how I worked around the problem for now. I remounted the q8movies share at the Multimedia directory and not the subfolder for Movies. That gave me the ability to see both folders by reusing the existing volumes mounted into my docker container. What you are proposing is not going to work with docker because I cannot add new volumes to the docker container that are then picked up by the plex application even though the container can see them correctly from the container’s bash shell. I can fix it by going native on the host, which bypasses docker volumes entirely, but I would like the ability to add volumes to my docker configuration that the plex application could pick up. I looked at the output from ls -la and stat. Nothing looked different to me from the exiting volumes to the new volumes within the docker container. However, there is something Plex does not like about volumes that have been added to my container, but it is perfectly happy using the four existing ones even if the underlying mount point changes to somewhere else.
My assumption is that the original volumes were added in an older version of docker. After I upgraded docker, even though the new volumes are added correctly to the container, which I can confirm via the bash shell, the plex application is looking for something that the updated version of docker presents that it doesn’t like.
I technically have movies1/movies2 and tv1/tv2. They are different NAS systems so I can reuse the same share name. I don’t love this approach because then I need to manage what goes where, which is not fun, but Plex handles merging all the folders together so it looks right to my clients. It also makes it easy to move data on the backend and the next Plex library rescan will relearn the location of the data, making migrations simple.
I also need to keep the two shares on the Synology separate because I hit the volume size limit on the Synology so they need be on different shares. At some point, I need to do some array consolidation.
I (we both) understand the max raid volume limits on both Syno and QNAP.
Built two DIY Ubuntu boxes with mdadm (was a LOT faster too)
This is the apollo (the bigger one)
Even the Plex metadata is on a 4TB SSD - striped 2TBs.
apollo@apollo:/vol/meta/plex/Plex Media Server/Logs$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 26G 8.5M 26G 1% /run
/dev/md0p1 464G 51G 414G 11% /
tmpfs 126G 4.0K 126G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 192G 6.1G 186G 4% /ramdisk
/dev/sda1 1.1G 6.1M 1.1G 1% /boot/efi
/dev/md4 3.7T 1.7T 2.1T 45% /vol/meta
/dev/md3 19T 8.6T 9.7T 47% /vol/audio
/dev/md2 182T 130T 53T 72% /vol/series
/dev/md1 164T 73T 92T 45% /vol/movies
tmpfs 26G 76K 26G 1% /run/user/127
tmpfs 26G 52K 26G 1% /run/user/1000
apollo@apollo:/vol/meta/plex/Plex Media Server/Logs$
This is glockner (the smaller)
[chuck@lizum ~.1998]$ gog df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 26G 3.9M 26G 1% /run
efivarfs 64K 46K 14K 78% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
/dev/md0 233G 73G 160G 32% /
tmpfs 126G 4.0K 126G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 8.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 192G 0 192G 0% /ramdisk
/dev/sda1 511M 6.1M 505M 2% /boot/efi
/dev/md1 931G 5.7G 926G 1% /home
/dev/md2 1.9T 719G 1.2T 38% /vmssd
/dev/md3 110T 75T 35T 68% /vol
tmpfs 1.0M 0 1.0M 0% /var/snap/lxd/common/ns
tmpfs 26G 4.0K 26G 1% /run/user/1000
[chuck@lizum ~.1999]$
Your statement about having to worry about where media is stored kinda goes with the turf.
When using docker, as long as /config is on a persistent, user-facing, filesystem then you can delete and recreate the container as often as you need without repercussions.
This is my docker test (used for supporting docker environments). I delete / recreate as often as needed (easier than manual pull)
sudo docker run \
-d \
--name plex \
--network=host \
-e PLEX_CLAIM="claim-J3YbuBpaBhE9oJS1jsma" \
-e TZ="EST" \
-e LANG="en_US.UTF-8" \
-e PLEX_UID=1000 \
-e PLEX_GID=1000 \
-e PUID=1000 \
-e PGID=1000 \
-h dockerplex \
-v /usb/dockerplex:/config \
-v /usb/dockerplex/tmp:/tmp \
-v /usb/dockerplex/transcode:/transcode \
-v /vie:/data \
-v /glock:/glock \
--device=/dev/dri:/dev/dri \
plexinc/pms-docker:plexpass
#docker start plex
#docker update --restart=unless-stopped plex
[chuck@lizum docker.2002]$
I have an Ubuntu system with 10 Gb interfaces and 2 x 2TB SSD drives. One for the OS and One for plex. It is a mini PC so it doesn’t have enough storage space onboard to house all my data. It does have support for a PCI card so I can install a RAID controller that can external array if I don’t want to continue doing things this way with NAS systems mounted via CIFS or NFS.
mdadm and LVM are great solutions in Linux for managing multiple drives. Newer filesystems like ZFS, bcachefs, and btrfs include a lot of the RAID management code without the need for a separate application to manage the drives, but that has its own tradeoffs. I also like that Synology supports SHR so I can have multiple drive sizes in a volume group together and get the maximum amount of storage from them. My QNAP arrays have one drive so because the do not support a RAID system that can handle multiple drives where I can get the most effective usable amount of storage possible.
What hardware are you using? Do you have an external storage array connected to a computer or a computer with multiple drive slots?
I erased everything in /config and started over. That still did not fix this problem. It is coming from somewhere else or something is saved somewhere else.
We have similar docker config files and docker is adding the new volume correctly to the container. It is Plex app not being able to see the new volume in the filesystem. It is really odd. Two ideas I have now are to either flatten the whole system and start over because I can’t find the source of the issue or move away from docker and install plex directly into ubuntu.
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