Plex deleted and re-added half of my movie library

Plex decided to delete half of my movie library and re-add this. This mess up the playlist, recently added and so on. Is there a way of “undoing this”. Considering moving to a backup, but would rather find a way of undoing this and investigate why it happened.

90% of all movies are in the same library

Server Version#: 1.23.3.4706
Player Version#: 1.33.0.2444-a220eae4
Plex Media Server Logs_2021-06-21_18-58-29.zip (5.9 MB)

Is your server configured to automatically / periodically scan the library for updates – in combination with automatically emptying the trash?
Settings > [Server Name] > Library

With that configuration Plex will immediately remove items it can no longer find – e.g. if the media is actually not available or some external/network storage takes too long to spin up. Personally I prefer to disable automatically emptying trash. This way Plex keeps the records in your library even if the files are temporarily not accessible.

It is, and I rather like that. And normally if a disk is not mounted or accessible, plex will mark the content of this as unavailable and not just delete it.

The strange thing here is that I have like 2,5K movies in one folder and that plex decided to remove half of that. In my opinion, plex should have either deleted the lot of it or simply marked everything as unavailable. I don’t get why it did this “kill 50%”.

Should of course mention that this is a rclone gdrive, but the rclone logs does not show any errors or other indicators of something going wrong.

There’s nothing wrong with automatic / periodic updates.
Just make sure you have Settings > [Server Name] > Library > Empty trash automatically after every scan disabled.

If there’s ANY danger of a storage device being asleep when Plex wakes up and starts doing maintenance… disable this:

or Plex will dutifully remove sleeping media from the database.
(my storage NEVER sleeps)

1 Like

Guess I will have to disable this to make sure it does not happen again.

Still don’t get why plex only deleted half of the library, as said, if the directory was not available, then plex normally just marks the content as unavailable.

So somehow plex must only have been able to read some of the folder, really don’t know why and how.

If the drive was spinning up, but hadn’t yet become available… that can happen.

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