Server Version#: NVidia Shield 2017
Player Version#: N/A
TLDR: My 256gb server hard drive is full. I can’t start the server to delete anything. I don’t know what’s safe to delete from the folder structure, and I don’t know why this is happening.
FULL MESSAGE:
I’m at my wit’s end here! My Plex server (w/ NVidia Shield) isn’t starting, likely because my dedicated 256GB SSD went from 234GB free space to 256kb overnight. I can’t start the server to access any of my Plex channels to check their settings or remove folders, but the TV channels were all created without video previews or intro detection.
I’m on my third rebuild of my entire Plex library. Fully from scratch, reformated SSD, set as removable storage. I added each channel independently, waiting for them to download all metadata before adding the next one, although my last folder added was my TV folder, which includes about 700 shows across three 8TB drives, and it was adding the last two drives’ of data when I was getting some non-response when it was searching for Metadata. I rebooted my Nvidia Shield, and the server wouldn’t start and I suddenly realized that my hard drive was filled.
So, this seems to me to be an issue with metadata downloading. I have a large-ish library, but is it possible that I’m downloading 256GB of metadata?
Is it safe to delete select portions of the server folder structure so I can restart without restarting from square one?
Any idea what’s going on? I’ve been wrestling with this for a week, it takes me about 3 days to rebuild the Plex server from scratch, and I really don’t want to start from Square One again, especially when I don’t have a handle on the underlying cause.
Thanks for the link. I’ve definitely poured my way through that page for info, but it hasn’t helped:
Video preview was turned off.
My hard drive should theoretically be large enough to store everything
I can’t start the server, so I can’t get into the server options to delete video previews if they existed.
Having a full drive shouldn’t prevent PMS from starting AFAIK. Have you moved the PMS data to a user accessible location. If so, there are cache folders you can safely delete manually. That might make enough room to allow you to get PMS running.
It’s the cache folder in the main Plex Media Server folder. There will be a “PhotoTranscoder” folder inside. These are the thumbnail images used by the clients. These get recreated so no issue deleting these.
Also check the “Transcode” folder in there too. If you setup a sync job, there may be transcoded versions sitting in there waiting to be transferred to the device.
Hmm. That doesn’t sound right. That folder should not be empty unless you had already manually cleared it. What folders do you see and how large are each?
Home directory Has
LOST.DIR (Empty)
NVIDIA_SHIELD (EMPTY)
Android
Data
com.android.vending (negligle)
com.google.android.gms (negligle)
com.google.android.katniss (negligle)
com.google.android.music (negligle)
com.plexapp.mediaserver.smb (everything)
Cache (empty)
Plex Media Server
Codecs (3 MB)
Media (pretty much all of it)
Metadata (7 gb)
Plug-in Support (1.73 GB)
Plug-ins (71MB)
I can’t give an accurate amount on the Media folder, as it takes about half an hour to read the files and get an estimate, but I’m thinking it is an issue with the hard drive format. The Media folder is still being indexed, but at the moment, it says it found 1.13GB of files that take up 15.8 GB worth of space. Another user recommended I format the drive as NTFS instead of exfat, as they had a similar problem and this fixed it. I’m going to give it a try.
Hmm, let me modify my hard drive report. Things are definitely funky. My Media folder finished indexing after 15gb. My entire “Android” folder has 3GB worth of files that take up 36.5GB of space on the disk, however, my hard drive says it’s taking up 150GB of space (my latest last ditch attempt was to cull some files from the Metadata folde) and yet there is nothing else in any other folders.
The Media folder would hold the preview thumbnails. These can be fairly large depending on how many video files you have on your server.
You could theoretically delete the folder. You’ll lose custom posters that you’ve uploaded, other subtitles that are not with the file, and the preview thumbnails.
I’m running a scandisk and repair on the drive atm, Windows found errors. Maybe that will help. If not, I’m going to reformat the drive as NTFS, then re-build again. I’ll make sure there isn’t any hidden option to override my selection to not download previews. We’ll see how it goes.
Just wanted to update: Changing my hard drive from exfat to NTFS fixed the problem!
Minimum file size on exFat is 256kb, minimum on NTFS is 4kb. Given the more than half a million teeny tiny files Plex added to my metadata, it all added up to a sizable problem.
So happy to have the server back to normal (12 gb total server space with all metadata downloaded. Phew!)
