Plex deleting TV shows from NAS - Reproducible

[adds21]

Server Version#: 1.21.4.4079

This is a reproducible issue, which I’m pretty sure I know why it’s happening, but I don’t know who to fix it.

I recently acquired a lot of old episodes of a TV show I regularly watch. I added these to my Plex TV library, and all was fine. The following day, I looked in my Plex library, and most of these files were missing. I checked the physical location (my NAS), and they’d been deleted from there too.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time looking around on here, but all I’m seeing is messages saying “Plex won’t delete the physical media, it must be something else”. So, for a test, I tried it again (luckily I had backups of the ~100 files). This time I put them in a temporary TV library which I just use for sorting shows. Sure enough, the following day, these files had been removed from the library and deleted from my NAS.

Then it occurred to me that I used to play around with the Plex DVR, although I’ve long since given up on it (literally, haven’t used it for about 2 years), and this particular show might have been one which I used to have a season pass for to record… And if so, it’s possible I had it set to only keep “x” episodes of the show.

So, I’m pretty sure that’s what’s deleting my files. Some old setting in the DVR season pass. I’ve tried reinstalling the DVR (I’d almost forgotten I have an HDHomeRun on my network!), but even though the DVR is now running, I have no session passes active, so I can’t see how to remove (or even find) the one which is deleting my files.

Can anyone give me any help? Thanks.

[BigWheel]

Afaik it is per show when setting up recording. If you add a show that you have never had on your server before does it also set that to delete watched episodes for that show?

Did you mark the show/episodes that got deleted as watched? or were the episodes already watched when you added them since you watched the episodes previously? Each show will have it’s own settings for keeping episodes

https://support.plex.tv/articles/226074728-setting-up-recordings/#toc-3

[adds21]

Ah! That’s it. Thank you. I hadn’t seen the settings under Advanced, but sure enough, the settings for my show was set to only keep the last 3 episodes. That absolutely matches which what I was seeing.

It is still interesting that this setting is presumably saved from years ago when I used to record this show (with a period of time where I had no episodes of this show in my library). Makes me wonder how many other shows I have with this setting on, although at least if shows go missing in the future, I’ll know where to look. Personally, a centralized setting where you can see the setting for mulitple shows on the same page would have helped me find this earlier.

Thanks for your help.