Plex deleted hundreds of my movies when I didn't tell it to

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Server Version#: 1.14.1.5488
Player Version#: 3.77.4

I have absolutely no trust in the Plex Media Server anymore. I lost more than 550 movies in the last day. I have a QNAP NAS set up with Plex Media Server on it. My collection had more than 1250 movies in it. I’m devastated and furious.

The problems with this go months back to when I decided to have Plex transcode my movies so that they would all be in mp4 format. I have some that are wtv and some that are m2ts and everywhere I read says that mp4 is what Plex likes. I start the process and it starts deleting my files. I paused all conversions and let it be. Last night I decided that I wanted Plex to optimized versions of a couple of movies for mobile so that I could put them on a tablet for the road. I noticed a huge queue of movies queued up for transcoding from my previous failure. I started canceling the transcodings one by one, but there were so many of them queued up. I checked after canceling the first few by hand and the files weren’t being deleted after I canceled the transcoding. I got tired of manually deleting each scheduled file to be transcoded in conversion activity so I looked around again and in Optimized Versions. I found the X option on the right hand side, but that looked like it would delete all of the movies I had optimized so I didn’t do that. Instead, in my Movies transcode job I gave it a limit of 1. I thought that this would complete the existing optimization job as it is, which is what is appeared to do and I thought this was good. Now I’ve discovered it appears to have deleted all of my optimized versions, maybe? This is my best guess. I’m guessing that I must have deleted some of the originals from the transcoding (we want mp4, right?) and now when I limited the job to 1, it deleted all but 1 of the converted movies from that job.

Why is plex deleting ‘optimized versions’ if the original has been deleted? This interface is awful and horribly confusing about what will be the end result. It is fine for transcoding if you want to make temporary optimized versions, but totally useless for things like converting everything to mp4, the recommended format.

Also, I have ‘Allow media deletion’ unchecked under Library. Why is the media server allowed to delete anything in this case? This lifetime plex pass just cost me many, many, many hours of repeated ripping of movies from discs.

1 Like
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Sorry you lost so many files. This is a giant fear of mine! While I can’t recommend anyway to transcode all you videos to a common format using Plex, you may want to look into HandBrake. It offers a GUI and a lot of great presets for transcoding videos. I am pretty sure you can even set up a queue of movies; when I used HandBrake to convert my library I used the command-line version in some scripts I wrote.

Best of luck!

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I am also sorry for the loss.

It seems this much-needed update came out a few days too late.

Here are the details and how you can prevent it from happening in the future.

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