I discovered that Plex deleted 34 TV shows. As I read the plex forums, it seems this has happened to many people. Apparently it’s because I have Plex DVR set to record my show from the OTA TV but only 5 keep 5 episodes. And then I downloaded the 34 episodes from the same show but different season. And plex isn’t smart enough to know the difference between shows that it is recording vs media that I have manually added into my library.
How are you all handling this? I’m totally freaked out that plex might delete not only TV shows but other files in my plex library … especially my home movies and personal photos or music.
Is there a way to reliably stop the deleting? (I’ve even seen that after plex dvr is disabled or removed that it continues to delete tv shows). Is the situation well understood with guidelines on how to avoid this problem? I haven’t seen any responses from plex employees on the forums … are they aware and giving us guidelines?
I’m afraid I may need to do a total wipe and reinstall of plex and make sure to not enable plex dvr.
This doesn’t help, if these shows are matched with the same agent.
You must also set the default agent of your DVR library to ‘Personal Media Shows’ to prevent your recorded media getting identified as the same shows as in your regular tv show library.
(Careful! This may have unintended consequences if you do it on an already filled DVR library. Be ready to restore a database backup it something goes wrong.)
As a safety measure, I only grant Plex server ‘writing’ privileges to certain folders.
All my ripped media are in folders which are read-only to plex.
I can’t find the global setting right now, but I do see that for each tv series recording, in ‘advanced setting’ you can set it to ‘keep all episodes’ and ‘do not delete after view’. This solves the issue.
And for me this is the default setting, I guess this came by as a config question when originally configuring the DVR (although you can’t seem to adjust it once you have finalized the DVR setup).
It is described here under ‘Keep’ and ‘Delete Episodes After Watching’, near the end of the article.
If someone knows how to change the defaults, please share…
