I added a new movie to my library and ran a library scan. It took the normal amount of time for the scan tor run and the new movie showed briefly, along with my other movies. A second or two later the screen refreshed and all of our movies, except for the new movie, disappeared.
After running the scan again and doing other things (changing to another local user, etc.) I opened my movie library directory and the only thing listed was the newly added movie. Everything else was gone, over 960 movies.
I am not new to Plex, Iāve had a lifetime pass for 10+ years. There was nothing else that I had clicked on. I have a complete backup of everything so I can recover but there is something wrong with PLex.
I have a zipped copy of the logs and the database but Iām not going to attach them until asked.
While thatās generally good adviceā¦ Iā mont sure the OPs media is deleted ā itās just dropped from their server (at least thatās how I understand their post and I seriously hope understood that correct).
Server logs should give pointers as for what went wrong.
Unless āswitching local usersā impacted your mounts and resulted in media no longer being visible to Plex, this should not result in your libraryās content getting lost.
I wonder thoughā¦ do you have Settings > [Server Name] > Library > Empty trash automatically after every scan enabled on your setup? This can result in Plex dropping any items it can no longer see during an ongoing scan. Thereās some safeguards preventing it from dropping media if an entire drive is not availableā¦ but those could be bypassed if the drive is available initially and then lost while the scan is progressing.
No, the Linux directory is empty (except for the new movie. The only thing I had done was run the scan after I had copied the moving into the directory.
Please share your logs and database. Does anything else has access to your media directory? Do you have a custom directory setup for your temporary transcoding location or downloads?
Your PMS version would suggest that you shouldnāt be hit by this issue
But thatās the only recent issue that resulted in similar behavior. Plex definitely should not have deleted your media.
Ok, hereās my update. Iām attaching the requested logs but note that I have not scrubbed them for personal info. However, I found all the missing movie files in the Trash folder so the restore was easier. Because they were in the trash folder I was going to write the issue off to either something I did by mistake or some Plex internal anomaly. So, I had my library back, minus the database content (date added, watched, etc.), so I was back to fairly normal.
So hereās more detailed response to your questions:
Does anything else have access to my media library: Yes, sorta, I run Handbrake on Windows (11) and the output is written directly to my Linux movie directory via a network connection. I cannot think of anything else
Ruling out a malicious actor (i.e. somebody had admin access to your server), PMS itself wonāt just delete things in the background unless something is very mis-configured (e.g. you mapped your temporary transcoder path to the location of your media).
TV shows can be configured to be removed (e.g. keep x amount of episodes) but again, you have to explicitly configure that and that wouldnāt affect movies.
PMS doesnāt have any logic to remove files in a batch manner like this, you can remove files individually via the API but that wonāt remove entire libraries unless it had been asked to do this from an external source (one by one) and the preference to enable media deletion was checked.
The logs you provided are not really useful because debug logging is disabled. A database also wonāt really tell anyone much, the logs with debug logging enabled when the issue occured would be required.
Ok, I appreciate everyoneās help very much. Iām going to write this off as something I did accidently. If by chance it is something with Plex then at least thereās a previous issue that might help.
Again, thank-you. I think that you can close this issue.
