Plex Media Server for Mac not starting

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.25.4
Player Version#: 1.29.0
MacOS Catalina: 10.15.5

I’ve been running Plex Media Server for years without many issues, transferring it to a few different hard drives during that time. About a month ago I set it up on a new computer and successfully had the server find all my media. Today while watching on a separate device, the power at my house hiccoughed causing my computer running Plex Media Server to restart. This has happened before without more than the annoyance of waiting for everything to come back online. This time however, the app did not automatically restart after the computer rebooted. I cannot get the app to run at all. It briefly flashes the icon at the top of the screen, nothing more. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app a few times, but it still will not run. I’m at a loss as to how to remedy this. Any ideas would be very welcome.

2

I was able to use Console to look for any errors in the Plex Media Server.log and found that the database had gotten corrupted, likely when the power went out momentarily. Luckily I use Time Machine and was able to restore the database from earlier. The server app started and all seems to right in the world again.

3

That’s good news.
Just keep in mind that TimeMachine has been known to create backups of the Plex database while its data was being changed, generating some corrupted databases when attempting to restore it.
If you rely on TimeMachine, make sure it’ll also create backups of the database backups created by Plex itself as part of the scheduled server maintenance (assuming you have that enabled).

4

Could still be a good idea to check for corruption.