My library was entirely "reloaded", losing all my tags, covers, etc

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.28.2.6151
Player Version#: Version 4.109.2
I have a lot of movies on my Plex server. I have various libraries for Drama, Thrillers, Horror, etc. and then by Movies and TV Shows. Usually when I add new movies, everything works fine and they appear on my Home screen as recent additions. But yesterday I added a few new movies to several libraries, including Horror Movies. And I also changed some “cover.jpg” files in several folders because I’ve been messing with cover graphics. When I rescanned files, as I usually do, to pick up the changes, something happened. On my Home screen it showed, under “Recently added”, the first files of my Horror Movies collection appeared (alphabetically) instead of the new additions. When I went to that library, I saw that a bunch of my covers had reverted, matches I’d had to make were gone, and all my tags were lost. For some reason, it completely reloaded my Horror Movies library as if it had never existed insteat of just adding the changes. And so all the data I’d set on the web was gone! This is very, very bad. I have over a 1000 movies in that library and I’d spent a lot of time fixing everything up and adding tags. It’s all gone. My various “collections” for that library are now empty. The other libraries (thriller, drama, etc) are unaffected.

I can reset everything (which will take several days), but now I’m very concerned that the data on the server is not permanent and that I will lose my tags and covers and matches and other things AGAIN. Does anyone know why this happened?

2

Settings - Server - Library - “Empty trash automatically after every scan”
clear this checkbox and leave it off.

Then revert your database to a snapshot before the incident.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202485658-restore-a-database-backed-up-via-scheduled-tasks/

After restoring the database, check once more the above checkbox and ensure it is and remains off.

3

Thank you for the reply. I have found and unchecked the box. Trying to decide if I will restore an earlier version since I spent a lot of time fixing everything already. But it is a good tool to have in mt pocket in case it happens again. I’d try to restore an older version immediately.

Any tips on why this happened and how often I might anticipate it?

4

If the above mentioned box is checked, but your media storage is outside your plex server machine, this can happen anytime again.

5

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.