This morning when opening Plex I was prompted to update to some new metadata that was available. After doing that it appears about half of my content has been removed. Looking at the logs I can see hundreds of records for “deleting directory”. What happened?! This is on a NAS so I don’t think I have any recovery options.
editing: Just to confirm, its not that I just can’t see the shows in Plex, it’s the actual files and directories from the hard drive that have been deleted
Server Version#: 1.22.0.4163
Player Version#:
Aug 28, 2021 09:39:05.786 [0x7f09a4b43700] DEBUG - Deleting directory []
Aug 28, 2021 08:48:24.191 [0x7f09d92a2700] DEBUG - Skipping over directory 'The Handmaids Tale/Season 3/The.Handmaids.Tale.S03E13.Mayday.1080p.HULU.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-NTb', as nothing has changed; removing 1 media items from map.
Aug 28, 2021 09:39:06.257 [0x7f09a4b43700] DEBUG - Deleting directory [The Handmaids Tale/Season 3/The.Handmaids.Tale.S03E13.Mayday.1080p.HULU.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-NTb] (601)
What I see is PMS “deleting” the directory from the list of directories to be scanned.
The only time I’ve seen PMS actually delete media are:
When “Media Deletion” is enabled in the Library settings and a player clicks “Delete” after watching something – which does have a confirmation requirement.
Long ago there was a problem.
What are the permissions for the shared folder where the media is stored? Read-only?
Thanks. It could be the files were deleted some other way but it was around that time that I noticed they were gone as I watched some of the deleted content yesterday.
I checked and the “Media Deletion” was enabled in the library settings which I have now disabled. The shared folder is set to read only for the Plex user on the synology NAS. It is read/write for the main account.
I am thoroughly confused as the only change I am aware of was switching to the new agent. I have also noticed it appears to only have impacted the TV Shows. Movies and Music appear to be OK.
What you now describe is more consistent with my observations of your logs.
Media shares marked as Read-only cannot be deleted by Plex. That’s how Linux works.
If you were using TMDB/IMDB with the legacy and switched, yes, it can appear to go screwy as heck when it switches over because it really is re-matching against that new agent.
That will take time… and remember… it still does a lot of work atter it matches to fill in all the data.
I regrettably conclude, like you, somehow the files were lost along the way and switching to the new agent, which is a full “rematch all I find and then clean up after” is what’s happening.
