The misunderstanding of the issue appears to be entirely on your end. The users here are talking about Plex deleting files from our disks, not from the Plex library. And you are completely wrong when you say that Plex doesn’t delete files without asking first–it deleted all of my Video files from my NAS and not only didn’t it ask me about it, it didn’t even let me know afterwards.
I realize that this is a bug, but for you to ignore such a critical bug for five years is appalling. I cannot understand how you are still in business.
Give me an email address and I’ll send you a tarball with the logs. The only instance of “delete” (with any capitalization) in any of the logs is in:
Plex Media Server.1.log:May 09, 2019 11:10:06.248 [0x7f5ae8468700] DEBUG - [Libr
aryTimeline] Scanner activity on section 2: 676 added, 0 deleted
Plex Media Server.1.log:May 09, 2019 11:10:07.682 [0x7f5ae8468700] DEBUG - [Libr
aryTimeline] Scanner activity on section 2: 676 added, 1 deleted
Plex Media Server.1.log:May 09, 2019 11:10:07.683 [0x7f5ae8468700] DEBUG - [Libr
aryTimeline] Scanner activity on section 2: 676 added, 2 deleted
with the deleted numbers increasing to 426 by the final entry.
I understand that the comments from users in this thread are claiming that Plex deleted their files. I’m saying is that we have never found any evidence that this was caused by Plex. The comment specifically above from Otto was regarding removing files from the database. He was not confirming that Plex deleted the actual file. If Plex is doing this, we would be more than happy to fix it, but so far we have not seen any proof that this was caused by Plex.
These entries in the log are referring to the entry in the database. This is not Plex deleting files. Look at the “added” number. Plex isn’t adding files, right?
Have you run diagnostics on your drives to make sure they are not going bad. If renaming a file is causing them to get deleted, it is possible there is a corruption in your drive’s file allocation table.
This is a brand new NAS system, with brand new disks. It is RAID-1, so if it were a hardware failure, it would need to be a failure on both disks in the exact same way (which is virtually impossible). The system is a Synology DS918+, and the drives are both Western Digital Red.
The only files that are disappearing are those in my media/Video directory. That points very strongly to a bug in your software. None of my media/Audio files disappeared, and there are far more of them than video files. If the trouble were in the hardware or in the OS there would be effects elsewhere also, but there aren’t.
You appear to have a very old bug that causes you to delete video files and not log the fact that you are doing so.
This complain has come up before and we’ve had our team of developers look over the code and cannot find anywhere that could lead to this happening. Anytime Plex deletes a file, it is logged.
If you don’t mind, could you create a library with just a few items in it and see if these get deleted. Maybe with only a few items, we can track what’s going on.
I’ll do that tomorrow. I’d like to get everything restored (a fairly long process) and then see if the issue recurs with Plex uninstalled. Just to make sure that the fault is not in the system software somehow.
Any info you can provide will be appreciated. We would love to get this identified if there is something in our program.
FYI - I’ve been using Plex for 6 years with the same setup and never had a file get deleted. We also have a whole test lab full of servers and NAS’s and have never seen this occur there either.
I haven’t had time to run the experiment but did find something interesting–you didn’t delete the video files, you moved them to Media/Music/Unknown/<dirnm>/<new filename>. (And no, that’s not a mistake–you moved the files from the Video library to the Music library directory). The dirnm you use is the same as the directory I had it in, and the filename is modified from the ones I used; in some cases just by having "00 - " prepended (no quotes), in other cases you got a different name from someplace like IMDB. You also duplicated many files, so I now have “00 - Ferris Bueller.m4v” and “00 - - Ferris Bueller.m4v”. These files are identical.
Yeah I guess I have never had cause to edit a show at series level.
Or at least never had cause to go into advanced at series level. Thanks for the heads up.
Please dont tell me the view play history has been there for years too. I only just noticed that as well.
I haven’t installed any other software on my Synology. It’s a new box, I put in 2 drives, formatted them as RAID-1, scp’d my media files, and installed Plex. And bought a Plex pass. Note that my media files were not in the structure you want (I noticed that you have an expected structure and I had planned on transitioning; I was working on my TV shows when all my files started disappearing out from under me).
I’ll admit I hadn’t read the FAQ, but the structure they give is the structure I used. I had a media share and had media/Music and media/Videos directories holding my music and videos (with subdirectories under those directories holding different artists (under Music) and different Video categories (Movies, TV, Home Video, etc) under Video/. Under each Video/ subdirectory were 2 or 3 further levels of subdirectories also, with video files at every level.
The system has now been running for a full day without Plex installed and nothing is disappearing from my Video directory. I think it has to be Plex that moved my files.
As far as I know, Syno’s come by default with ‘Video Station’.
There is a warning in the FAQ:
Note: It is recommended that you do not store your Plex media files in the default Video shared folder. This folder is reserved for use by Video Station and it has been known to cause issues with Plex in the past.
The feature is scary?
I use it for stuff I’ll never watch more than once. Late night shows like Jimmy Kimmel.
It works very well. Haven’t had an issue.
Well I’m a hoarder and never delete anything.
But if the feature has been there for so long (un-noticed by me) then I guess it’s a moot point.
That said having read posts from Plex employees for the same number of years that Plex cannot physically delete media (outside of DVR) maybe I’m not the only one who didnt know the “feature” was there.
Sure, You have to pyhysically set the individual show to achieve it, but that’s beside the point. Thank heavens Plex NEVER has bugs where things dont quite go to plan.
So yeah scarier still the more I think about it.
