My old computer motherboard died which hosted plex with no issues. I built a new computer and set everything up the same. I slowly started noticing a show or movie missing. I thought at first that I just didn’t copy everything over somehow since I got a larger hard drive to host plex as well.
It’s when my music started to disappear that I found out that when I finish a movie, tv show or album that plex deletes it. I have disabled any deletion methods I can find to include the one that I loved which was deletion of a movie I didn’t want to keep as admin from my TV rather than getting on the server to delete it.
I don’t know what to do. I have looked at everything in Google to fix it but nothing looks wrong. This is a completely fresh install on a freshly built PC.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Quagmir@gmail.com if you wish to email me a solution.
That sounds… odd.
Plex doesn’t delete or modify any files with the following 2 exceptions:
tv-show libraries (primarily those linked to a DVR) configured to only keep a certain amount of episodes / delete episodes after watching. This option doesn’t exist for movie or music libraries.
manually deleting items from within Plex if the option to delete items has been enabled for the server owner
Every now and then there’s a user experiencing files being deleted or simply dropped from Plex – most cases I remember ended up pointing to some 3rd party apps that were trying to manage files.
Can you verify the files are physically gone from your file system or if they’re only dropped from your libraries inside Plex?
Completely gone. Not even in the trash bin. Totally deleted from the hard drive. Again this is a new system and plex is really the only thing on it besides whats comes default with windows 10 that couldn’t be deleted or disabled.
I have no problems deleteing and rebooting windows either if I thought it would help. I uninstalled and reinstalled plex and that didn’t work.
I am also experiencing missing movies and TV series I manually added to Plex (not DVR content).
I’ve been wracking my brains over this issue for over a year now.
Like the OP, nothing is in my recycle bin and I don’t have any other apps that use my television and movies folders.
I to works love to know how and why these files are disappearing!
Is it Plex or some other program? I have no idea. My libraries are so large, it’s impossible for me to track when the files were actually deleted.
I did completely wipe my system Windows system drive late last year and only installed necessary Plex related or transcode software on it and my files are still being deleted/missing.
I have a large library as well. I have just decided that I am only going to let plex have access to what I am watching. I will make a copy of the things I am currently watching and plex can access that and delete it all it wants to. Chrome remote desktop allows me to access my media PC and add things from my laptop or phone as needed. I thought about buying a second 20tb drive and using windows storage space like it was in raid and writing the same things to both drives while only giving plex access to just one drive. I still might do that if I get tired of trying to dance around the auto delete.
Let me know if you have better ideas. Not sure what else I can do. Plex is a nice media server and I am used to it…
My movie and tv collections are backed up to a separate networked computer every 80 minutes, but the backup storage isn’t unlimited, so I tend to clear the “deleted or changed” files/videos every few weeks or so.
I wish Plex was able to filter “missing” files in my Movie and Television collections!!! Ahhh!
As for your workaround, I have to many family and friends viewing my content, so it would be impossible to add/remove Plex access to those files.
