Looking around this forum, I’ve found several threads going back years asking for this - the ability to easily retain all catalog info and metadata about an entry (preferably at the series or season level) even when the actual large media files have been moved to offline storage. When someone tries to play one, it’d be nice to have a popup indicating those files are offline, and maybe offering to send a request to admin for moving them back? Perhaps there could even be a visible indicator in the catalog that a file has been archived?
Lots of people seem interested in this over the years, even saw posts in the Requests forum (that’d been marked as “duplicates”) but I couldn’t find any clean/official solution, only hacks involving scripts to copy files around while replacing them with little placeholders and/or disabling trash collection? Messy, and we’re all gradually collecting more media so this is going to keep becoming a bigger problem.
While this discussion occasionally pops up… the related feature suggestion didn’t catch much attention – you’re welcome to vote/comment in that thread to give it another try (this is by the way the suggestion all those closed/duplicate ones should be pointing at)
I suppose the key reasons why many users don’t care are:
many/most Plex users are hoarders (in a very positive meaning)
you can relatively easily replace your actual media file with a dummy one
simple approach: create a text file, maybe with the path where you moved the file… name it as the original file (incl. the file extension) and replace it → Plex will still recognize the file; after analyzing it will of course find no more technical details (e.g. resolution, bitrate) and it won’t be able to play
nerd mode: some users even create a tiny placeholder video (less than 1 MB in size)… this one will even play, though the technical details will match the placeholder video (not that of the original file)
Thanks for the response, and the workarounds. Creating placeholder text files is simple, but many TV shows have hundreds of episodes and replacing each of them individually would be a tedious process. Doesn’t seem like it’d be complex to have a simple toggle for Plex to treat an entire show as “archived” and freeze the associated metadata even if the media files are missing.
Maybe i am misunderstanding but how is this different than just not having emptying trash after a scan set? is there a caveat to that I am not thinking of at the moment which won’t make it work for you?
Ok, maybe what I’m really looking for is a toggle to exclude items from being cleaned up as trash? I don’t want to keep everything I delete in my Plex catalog forever, only certain shows.
you can manually delete a show that is unavailable for good if you have allow media deletion enabled. This will remove it from DB immediately. Though I guess that flow is a little awkward. I can see some sort of lock to prevent mistakenly emptying trash for whole library. Interesting idea,
When I finish watching something and delete it via Plex as in the screenshot above, I really do want both the actual file and the Plex catalog data removed. If I manually relocate a media file, or put it on storage that isn’t always online, I want the option to flag it as something Plex should keep even though it can’t see the associated file at all times. I was thinking of applying that at the series level, but I suppose a library level setting could make sense.
It isn’t elegant, but I experimented with creating a little video placeholder that says the media is offline and to ask for it to be made available. I was hoping to have just one copy of that file and create symbolic links for multiple filenames to it (even just per-library), but Plex doesn’t seem to grok that.
