I love this program but it does something that is extremely frustrating. Out of the blue it will delete my entire Movies library. I don’t know why. It just did it today and this was at least the 4th time it’s done it since I first got Plex which as been over a year.
Today I just happened to be in front of my computer when it happened. I had just restarted my router. When my wi-fi came back up, Plex sees this and re-connects. Just as soon as it did that, it just started deleting my library, one movie at a time until they were all gone. Over 700 movies. After that, it says it is updating my library, hang tight. It is currently updating and replacing those movies.
What is frustrating is that Plex doesn’t remember the changes I make on some of the movies. I have several movies I have to fix matches on, merge together, etc. This is time consuming.
Hi, I appreciate the reply. I just uploaded the logs. My operating system is Windows 10 Home 64 bit. That’s what runs PMS. I will be happy to provide any information needed. Sorry, I did not know which category to post in.
Ok. So I had both of those checked. I have them unchecked now. I use a Buffalo NAS (which I know little about). I consider myself somewhat computer proficient but I am new to this type of technology. I apologize for not giving all the necessary info up front.
I still have ‘Scan my library periodically’ checked. Is that ok?
You might want to disable that as well.
What probably happens is this: The plex server senses ‘something has changed’ with the media storage. And starts a library update immediately.
For some reason, the NAS is not fully operable (or is not accessible from the Plex sever) so Plex thinks all those files are missing. And promptly removes them from the library.
I hope both your plex server and the NAS are using wired connections to the router?
If not, consider rearranging devices and put wires into place.
Thanks again. I have now unchecked that box too. My NAS is wired to the router. The server is being run on a laptop that I don’t use much in another room, on wi-fi obviously. I don’t really have a way to run the server on another device.
This happened to me on my MAC Mini server last night. It deleted all my movies off my 4TB external hard drive. Are my movies all gone or is there a way to restore them? I had no back up set up yet.
Plex doesn’t delete movie files.
It may forget they are existent and therefore removes them from its library, but it won’t touch the video files on disk themselves.
For actual file deletions to happen, a user must issue a ‘delete’ command. And only a user with access to the server owner’s username and password is able to do that.
And no, Plex doesn’t backup your movie files anywhere.
