Short version: after some data loss, system reimaging, and poor decisions, I thought I’d save myself some headaches in case I ever lose both my Sonarr and Plex db again and have my show level folder be Title (Year) {tvdbid}. I do this with filebot and it makes readding shows to Sonarr blazing fast.
It appears that Plex scanner (set to only pick up changed folders) keeps scanning these as well whenever a scan is triggered, and the log says something like this for every show and season folder:
Feb 01, 2025 16:10:18.382 [40776] DEBUG - Updating directory 'Arrested Development (2003) {tvdb-72173}\Season 02' (ID 36270) to time 2025-02-01 11:46:18.
Sonarr does NOT connect to Plex, it only downloads media to the drive plex monitors.
OS is Windows 11 running a large Stablebit Drivepool volume with duplication off.
Why does this rescan happen? My series foldername is appropriate per official Plex documentation.
The automatic scan is triggered by a change in the folder, probably caused by some *arr app.
These tend to perform write operations very often, thus triggering the change of the “modified” time stamp.
Continue what @OttoKerner said, it is not recommended to have media downloaded directly to where Plex monitors. You should have it download to a staging folder and then you should be able to have the *arr move the file once it completes all the processing.
Well I turned off Sonarr completely, changed a foldername, and it triggered a scan of a few thousand folders, some with my new show naming convention, some regular. I’ve let this cycle a couple of times now with all applications that could have any chance of modiying these files turned off. All these shows and the episodes within being scanned are matched. I’m open to other suggestions but I have to assume either I’ve got a corrupt DB or something about this folder naming convention is bugging out.
You can always try @ChuckPa’s tool to check/repair your DB (even if your DB is not messed up, it does tend to help speed certain aspects up such as searching).
