One day, my server just disappeared

Plex Media Server
1

I’ve been running a Plex server on my Nvidia Shield Pro for a few years now. It’s not been without its problems: I’ve had to restore a database backup several times to fix a corruption. But this has always resolved any problem. Until recently.

One day my server just disappeared. It’s not that it was inaccessible, showing with an exclamation mark. It was gone. It’s like the server had been deleted. It was no longer a server I had access to in my account.

In the Shield settings, the Server option had also disappeared. This is what happens when the database gets corrupted, except usually this isn’t accompanied by the whole server no longer appearing anywhere.

I followed my usual steps to restore a backup. The server files were all there as normal. However, restoring a backup known to work, and then rebooting the Shield several times, failed to make either the server start again, or for it to appear again in my account.

In short, although the files of the server were still in the same place (an external SSD connected to the Shield), PMS just would not start, and Plex no longer showed the server whatsoever.

This was obviously pretty annoying as the only solution was to start the whole server again from scratch. I deleted and reinstalled Plex and now I have a working (empty) server again.

The only thing I can think of which might have been the cause of the issue is that the Shield device lost and regained power several times in short succession on the day that the server died. This must have caused some catastrophic corruption.

It is really awful that Plex provides no way to restore a server. It would save me a lot of trouble if I could even restore the server back to an empty state. The trouble with starting a new server is that I have to invite everyone again, many of whom aren’t tech savvy and will literally struggle to accept the invite. I’ll have to go round their houses again and make sure they’re set up properly. To maintain everyone’s access it would be great to have a server reset button. Something like, I can reinstall Plex from scratch and create a new server, but indicate that I want that new server to take on the identity of an old existing server.

2

You made several missteps, the two biggest of which is: 1. now we can’t help you because you deleted everything, and 2. you caused the server to reset to an empty state because you deleted everything. Ergo, deleting everything was one big misstep.

Not sure what you expect the devs to do now since you wouldn’t have to start from scratch if you didn’t delete everything.

3

More just reporting it/requesting a better reset feature.

But I kept a backup of the data folder if that’s of use?

4

Up to you if you want to start from scratch or try to recover.

5

What are my steps to try to recover?

I’ll tell you what I already tried:

  1. Reinstall Plex app. On Shield I belive this is tied together with PMS, so reinstalling the Plex app also reinstalls PMS. At any rate, it wipes the server fresh so it can start again!
  2. Move the new server to my external hard drive.
  3. Turn off the server.
  4. Replace the whole data folder with the backed up data folder from the original server, minus the database. Splice in a backup of the database that was known to be uncorrupted.
  5. Reboot the Shield. On reboot, PMS is set to automatically start again.

This procedure didn’t work:

  • It leads to what I call the “death error” when is that the entire entry for PMS in Plex’s settings disappears. (As mentioned in my OP, this has previously been a sign of a database corruption and was resolvable simply by rolling back the database. That’s already what was included in the above procedure, so the fact that the error remains points to a bigger problem.)
  • The identity of the old server is not restored. The Plex app still shows the new server (with its default name) but now inaccessible.

I also tried the above procedure but at step (4) I instead kept all the default folders of the fresh Plex install, including its empty database, and instead replaced only the top level Preferences.xml and .localadmin files. My hope was that this would restore the server’s identity, and then I could rebuild the database. Sadly it only led to the exact same outcome as above.

6

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