Server Version#: 1.32.8.7639
Player Version#: 4.121.1
Win 10 Pro
Intel NUC8
Plex regularly (every week or two) marks about half my music library as “Unavailable”. I’ll go to play some music, and it fails, and I check the library and the library is full of red deleted icons. I then scan the library and the songs are added back. Fortunately, I haven’t lost any actual mp3 files, they’re just removed from Plex for some reason.
This is new behavior which started happening a few months ago. Hadn’t seen this problem prior. Now that it’s happened at least 6 times, I’m getting frustrated.
I’m assuming this is a side effect of some scheduled maintenance process. Has anyone seen anything like this before? Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot it?
Disable “Empty trash automatically after every scan” if your media files are stored outside of your Plex server machine, or if you let your media hard drives spin down their platters while idle.
Yes, I keep that disabled for all my libraries so I have to consciously choose to delete any media files.
All my media is stored on a NAS. They are magnetic drives, not SSD, but I have servers logging and backing up to it regularly, so I’d be surprised if it’s idle much.
Enable “debug” (but not “verbose”!) logging on the server, then hope it retains enough log files so you can find something in there after the next occurence. (Look for the word “destroy”)
Yes, I organize all my media in the way Plex recommends, so all my music is in an Artist\Album\Track folder structure, and preferring local metadata so it uses all the MP3 tag information I’ve already embedded into the tracks.
I keep my server in verbose logging in general since it helps diagnosing problems. Checking the logs for “destroy”, the only entries I see are for the episode guide removing old entries for the DVR, e.g.
Jan 07, 2024 09:03:26.741 [5976] DEBUG - EPG[cloud]: Purging 38 airings which completed in the past.
Jan 07, 2024 09:03:26.743 [5976] DEBUG - Destroying metadata item 414 (The Big Dig; Amazing Man)
Jan 07, 2024 09:03:26.752 [5976] DEBUG - Destroying metadata item 1446 (Best Cooling Topper for Back & Hip Pain!)
Jan 07, 2024 09:03:26.755 [5976] DEBUG - Destroying metadata item 1469 (This Is Not Foreplay, This Is War)
Jan 07, 2024 09:03:26.758 [5976] DEBUG - Destroying metadata item 1792 (Mac + Fallout + Jack)
I’ll take another look the next time this happens and perhaps there will be more information there. Thanks!
No, it doesn’t.
All it does is to flood the logs with irrelevant messages which only serve to get the log “rotated” far too early to diagnose issues such as this which are usually too long in the past when you notice them.
Do you have you NAS share mounted as a lettered network drive? How is the library location configured in Plex? Is it M:\Music or is it \\NAS\Share\Music? If it’s the lettered one, try switching to the other method. Sometimes windows loses the letter association if the NAS disconnects. Having Plex use the Server/Share method will get rid of that issue.
I use a letter drive. I experimented with using UNC paths but ran into a permissions issue where the plex user couldn’t write to the drive. Spent some time digging into it but gave up before I solved it. I’m sick of Microsoft periodically stalling reboots with their insistence on shoving some unnecessary garbage in my face, so at some point I’ll be switching either to bare metal Linux or the Docker container.
You could also give Windows Server a try. Doesn’t force reboots, unnecessary app installs, or other bloat. And it’s stupid-stable.
I’ve thought quite a few times about switching to Linux but I’m so much more comfortable scripting with Powershell than bash, and I don’t want to deal with stupid permissions issues.
Ah, thanks for the info, @OttoKerner . I was assuming the log rotation was time-based not filesize based. I’ll turn verbose off after we figure this out. {edit: oops, I see you asked for debug logs not verbose logs originally. I’ll turn off verbose now, sorry!..}
This just happened this morning at 9:04:55 server time. My Plex server was in the middle of recording a TV show on the DVR when it suddenly started a full library scan on its own. I have scheduled tasks set to run from 1a to 6a so I’m surprised it picked a time several hours later to just start scanning. On top of it all, my DVR recording stopped at the same time - could be a coincidence but it’s weird that they both seemed to happen at the same time.
I checked the logs for “[Dd]estroy” but didn’t see anything but artist names and DVR entries. I typically view my Music library by artist name, and whenever it does this it seems to always be the same artists, e.g. 3 Doows Down, Aaron Neville, ABBA are the first 3 in my library and all 3 marked with unavailable files.
I’ve attached the logs for when it happened. Any insights / recommendations much appreciated!
@OttoKerner does anything stand out in the log files? It happened again last week - PMS started scanning the Music library again in the middle of the day and marked half the library as missing.
I’m hoping someone can give me an idea why this is happening and how to fix it.
