Woke up today to find 2/3 of my Movie library showing under Recently Added with all movie covers reset to plex defaults. Looks like this happened starting at 5AM PST. The logs are riddled with errors so something went terribly wrong at 5AM PST it seems.
This plex instance has been happily running on this macOS Server for years without issues and no changes were made in the recent days leading up to this that could explain a sudden issue with the database, yet it almost seems like the database lost a large portion of the media library and then re-added them when scanning the Movies folder. Other than that the server appears happy and healthy and everything is working as intended.
Has anybody else experienced something like this?
Attaching the main plex server log, but debug was not enabled during this time period. Several of the server logs show a plethora of errors, but I don’t know what’s expected and what might help shed some light on what happened.
Plex server behaved over night. I’m still going through logs to try and find out how this 10 year old Plex server lost 2/3 of the movies and then re-added them as new. Any help from experienced Plex’ers would by very much appreciated.
Never enable the server setting to automatically empty the trash, if any of your media is stored outside of the server machine.
Quite likely you have it currently enabled, which then caused the movies to get ousted from your library when the server performed its maintenance in the night and the NAS didn’t react timely enough or was completely unavailable.
In the future, keep this in mind:
Before manually emptying the trash, perform a library scan.
Start the library scan after you have verified that the NAS is accessible for the server and all drives in it are already spun up.
I did in fact have this setting turned on and it’s been that way for the last 10 years without issues. Thanks for the tip OttoKerner. I’ve turned it off and restored the database to the backup done before this happened.
Why this happened I don’t fully understand as my NAS is always available and both the plex server and Synology NAS are connected on 10Gbit connections. The only thing I can think of is that the Synology NAS was possibly performing a data scrubbing task and somehow caused delays in response.
