Plex only adds a small number of existing shows to library

[jdough52]

Hi there, Plex Community!

First off: Yes, I did do a search before posting. Yes, I am aware that similar issues have been reported (those discussions did not help me). Yes, I am aware of the naming conventions for media files, and have applied them all correctly (and also not changed them for years of using Plex without problems).

With that out of the way, here’s my extremely weird issue:

I recently migrated my PMS to a new computer (from Linux to Mac). I followed this guide, and everything seemed to work nicely (all shows on deck, watched statuses intact, etc.) – or so I thought.

Today, when searching for an older show I had not watched in a long time, Plex wouldn’t find it. I checked my media folder directly, to make sure I hadn’t accidentally deleted the files, but it was still there. So, instead of just looking at the Plex home screen, like I normally do, I opened up the full library view for TV Shows, and noticed for the first time that it had only 59 shows listed. My media folder (Synology network share) contains 299. All of those 299 shows were in my library prior to the migration.

Initially, I thought there might be a pattern, with only more recent shows showing up. And while it’s true that all 59 are new-er, there are definitely some in there that haven’t been watched or had any new content added after the migration.

I tried the usual troubleshooting, plus all somewhat related tips I could find online:

• Rebooted PMS
• Emptied trash
• Cleaned bundles
• Optimized database
• Switched to a different (dummy) media folder and removed/re-added the old one
• Renamed my media folder (in between the previous step) and re-scanned

No matter what I do, Plex always finds and adds the same 59 shows, and ignores a whopping 240 others that are in the same folder and were in my library previously. So, I have no idea what’s going on here. And before I choose the nuclear option and completely reset my library (and lose all my watched statuses for 299 shows), I’m hoping that someone here as any better ideas.

P.S. One thing I noticed during the troubleshooting process: One of the two times I created a secondary media folder to switch to from my usual one, I copied one show into the folder that was not getting added to my library. When Plex scanned the new folder, it did add this show. I haven’t been able to try this on a large scale (i.e. copy all my media files to a different folder) due to lack of storage space (we’re talking over 3TB of data here). But maybe it’s an indication as to what’s going on.

Server Version#: 1.23.6.4881 (Mac)
Player Version#: various (not relevant)

[jdough52]

Because I hate it when other people leave their topics just dangle, even after they found a solution, allow me to update this briefly – especially because the “solution” here was ridiculously obscure:

In a nutshell, all of my recent problems since the migration to a Mac server came down to one evidently corrupted folder on my NAS.

I stumbled upon this by accident, when copying all of my data to an external drive in order to test moving all media files to a new location to fix the problem described here. Every time I tried to access this folder (one season of one show) in Finder, Finder would crash. Like, completely. Spinning wheel of death, unable to restart either Finder or the Mac, needed to hard reboot. Every time (beforehand) when I selected multiple (or all) folders to copy with this folder included, the entire network share would eject. I couldn’t even delete the folder, as that also resulted in Finder crashing.

So, once I was sure (through painstaking – and painful – manual trial and error) that no other folders on my NAS were having the same effect, I simply copied all data except that one folder to the external drive, then completely wiped and factory reset the NAS and the drives in it. Afterwards, I copied all the data back, minus that one folder.

Lo and behold: Everything works now! Not only does Plex now find and add all shows again (before it must simply have quit whenever it hit the corrupted folder part of the way through the library scan), I’ve also had zero disconnections of the network share following library scans (see this issue).

I literally have no idea whatsoever how one corrupted folder (or even one corrupted file in one folder), especially one stored on a NAS (i.e. not even on the server itself), can cause issues on this scale. But, empirically, it somehow did.

I’ve now set up a new data scrubbing schedule on my NAS and hope this will prevent anything like this recurring in the future. And while this is probably a one-in-a-million edge case, I still wanted to leave this here for anyone experiencing similar symptoms. Make sure you check the integrity of your files!