I recently upgraded from an external HD to a QNAP NAS, though I am still running my server off my Mac. Everything was great at first - I was able to restore all my metadata perfectly from a backup, and it was generally a pretty painless transition. However, yesterday it seems to have refreshed all metadata, thereby undoing all my changes - which was terrifying. Fortunately l was able to restore the metadata from my backup, though this caused a few problems of its own (I had to correct a bunch of dead filepaths leading to my old hard drive, and we had added quite a few media items since the backup which disappeared and needed to be re-added.
Worse, however, was that it refreshed again today, and I’m now in the process of copying the old backup AGAIN. I have no idea what the possible catalyst for these events could be, but today it happened right after I tried to take a new backup. “Empty trash automatically” is disabled, so I haven’t been able to find any further online guidance on this. Server is updated to the latest version. Please help!
Are any items displayed if you apply the “Unmatched” filter to an affected library (after restoring it)? If so, that might indicate that some media became unmatched during your migration.
Speaking of that, can you describe the procedure you used to migrate your media? There should have been no need to restore from backup if you only migrated media (unless your database was corrupted). Provide as much detail as possible.
For reference, here’s the Plex-documented procedure for migrating media:
Thank you so much for the response! It doesn’t appear that the files are becoming unmatched, it’s more that Plex is using the metadata from the file itself instead of any genre or title updates I’ve made updates to. For example, some of the titles will revert back to something like Movie.year.download and the genres will change from “Science Fiction” back to “Sci-fi” after I’ve already changed that. They’re still matched, however - Plex will still pull in the actors, trailers and other associated content. Also, this didn’t happen right when we first moved the files over. We actually followed the articles to the letter and it worked perfectly for a day or two… but then Plex just started overwriting metadata on random files
Which agent and scanner do you have configured in your library? I know you mentioned in your other thread that you’d moved local media assets to the bottom of the priority list (in the Plex agents configuration, presumably), but that only affects metadata if you’re using the “Plex Movie (Legacy)” or “The Movie Database” agents.
For “Plex Movie” agent libraries, the choices for which assets and metadata to prefer are actually configured in the library itself, via these two settings:
If “Prefer local metadata” is enabled, a metadata refresh will cause embedded tags to be used (if your media is .mp4 or .m4v).
Finally, there’s a scheduled task setting which causes Plex to automatically refresh metadata; the exact timing isn’t specified. It’s located under: Settings (Server Name) -> Scheduled Tasks -> Refresh library metadata periodically
Thank you so much for the detailed response. I’m out of town (away from my server) at the moment but will look into my settings and respond when I’m back in a few days. It really means so much, thank you!
Thank you so much once again. I went through and looked at the settings you mentioned. First of all, thanks so much for the tip about the scheduled tasks - the one you mentioned was enabled, so that may explain why it was randomly renaming most of my files every few days! I unchecked it and we’ll see if that fixes that problem.
However, I’m still having the issue wherein viewing/editing certain files causes their metadata to revert to what’s embedded. As an example, the movie RoboCop will reliably have its title changed to something like “01 - ROBOCOP” or whatever its name is in the file metadata, and the tags will be changed back as well (it is removed from all collections it’s in, the genre is changed from “Science Fiction” to “Sci-Fi,” etc.). This is the case with my entire library, depending of course on whether the file has metadata like that. The “prefer local metadata” and “use local assets” were both checked, so I unchecked them, but it didn’t solve the problem, unfortunately. Is there anything else I can try?
