So, I just loaded up a new PLEX server. The server is really just a head to my media that is being stored on a NAS. A friend of mine messaged me this morning and stated they were getting a disk error (Low disk Space). My server is VM’d, so I expanded my C drive and ran a scan to find the large directories. I see that Plex Media Server/Media/Localhost has accumulated 28.5GB of data across different lettered and numbered folders.
I’m assuming this is for faster playback and transcoding purposes.
My questions:
When do these folders get cleared (If at all)
If I clear them manually (Scheduled Task) what would be the fall out?
Plex server does only create permanently stored copies of media if you use the ‘Optimize’ command. So don’t, if you don’t have the storage for it.
Plex server will create temporary copies of media if
(mobile) users are triggering a Sync operation (careful to whom you grant this privilege)
users are playing a media file which requires transcoding
However, if a user requests to sync a large number of media (or even whole library) at once to his phone, then the server will first start to transcode all this media files and write the results to a temporary storage location, inside the Plex data folder.
Only after that is finished, will the prepared data be moved to the mobile device.
And after that is successfully finished, the temporary copies will be removed from the server.
Depends on what you are clearing.
Results could go from ‘nothing’ to ‘major malfunctions related to sync and/or playback’.
So, I went looking for optimized versions, based on the link in the Optimize Command link, and there are none on my server. It looked like all the folders were created yesterday morning out of the blue.
This happened on another Plex Server that I had about 6 months ago. It was a linux box, and I wasn’t familiar with linux, so I ended up blowing up the box trying to clear the data.
I’m now on Windows and out of no where, the server just started chewing up storage.
