Music Artist Posters & Album Art Suddenly Missing after 1+ year of Use

[ShooterQ]

Server Version#: 1.25.2.5319
Player Version#: 1.39.1.2763-300bb607

Hello, I’ve been running my Plex server for over a year now and have had very few complaints. When I do run into issues, I’m usually able to troubleshoot and research issues on this forum, reddit, the manuals/FAQs, etc. until I find solutions but this time I can’t figure it out.

Art for my audio albums and artists is mostly gone. I say audio because it includes my audiobooks and standup comedy, not just music, so multiple libraries are affected but only one file type. This is consistent across all devices. This occurred last week and I have no idea why.

Opening an artist or album to edit the posters shows boxes where the options would normally be, but they are missing content to fill their frames.

The only art that is available related to music is art that I previously uploaded manually, before I started having issues, like this picture of my car for my driving playlist…

… or this art of some audiobook authors.

Remedies I’ve tried so far:

• Refreshing metadata, analyzing, and unmatching/rematching for individual artists and albums

• Refreshing metadata and analyzing entire audio libraries

• Changing agents from Plex Music to Plex Music Scanner to Last.FM and back again

• Turning on and off sonic analysis

• Removing my entire music library from Plex and then replacing it to be scanned again, which yielded some odd results wherein I could see art populating as albums were scanned then disappearing again

• Downloaded the Database from the Troubleshooting page (I read in another forum post that this helps me confirm that the database isn’t corrupt)

• Optimize Database button

• Clean Bundles button

Still haven’t accomplished anything and I’m not sure what to do. Movies and TV shows remain unaffected and music is still searchable and playable, but it’d be nice to have the art back.

Any ideas on anything else I might try or any obvious fixes I’m missing? Thanks.

[OttoKerner]

Are you using a 3rd-party anti virus software?

Did you relocate the Plex data folder away from its default location?

[ShooterQ]

No 3rd-party anti virus, just the basic Windows Security.

I did relocate the Plex Data Folder to a location other than default so that it can sit on the D drive of my server instead of the C drive; the C drive is a relatively small NVME that was only intended to carry the OS and some essential programs while the D drive is a pool of multiple drives.

However, I performed that relocation in late 2020 and hadn’t had problems with it. I’ll check to make sure I’m still pointed towards the right location. This is the guide I used to relocate the data folder. Anything else I should check concerning the data folder?

[OttoKerner]

And D: is neither a drive pool nor is it formatted with a file system other than NTFS?

[ShooterQ]

My server’s D drive is a drive pool but is formatted as NTFS. Is it being a drive pool a problem for the data folder? It hasn’t affected other metadata for the music nor posters/art for movies and tv shows, so I assumed that wasn’t the problem.

[OttoKerner]

DrivePool doesn’t support Symlinks, even if you are formatting the pool as NTFS.
Therefore you will lose almost all posters and pictures, if you move the Plex data folder onto such a pool.

[ShooterQ]

Thank you, I didn’t realize that. I’ll look into moving the data to its own space on either one of my parity drives or a separate SSD.

[ShooterQ]

I’ve moved my Plex Data to an external HDD for now to test it and all of my album/artist posters are coming back. Thanks again @OttoKerner.

I’ll be pursuing a dedicated SSD for this purpose since the two NVMEs for my server are for the boot drive and the cache drive to my DrivePool; this also helps a ton when planning my next server build.