Twice now in the past six weeks, I’ve logged into Plex to see that all of my carefully selected Posters and Backgrounds have been replaced with some random default image. This is exhausting. Why is this happening? Is this a bug? Sure seems like it! Any way to get it to revert to my prior selections?!
As far as I can tell, this only happens on my Movie library, not on my TV Shows or other libraries.
In addition, it doesn’t just seem to lose the artwork selections, it seems to re-match the entire library, because some of my ambiguous titles completely lose their metadata and I have to re-match them.
Any Plex Ninjas or employees want to chime in? Is there a way I can avoid this problem or backup my selections and restore them? It took me a few hours to get things back to how I like it.
This happened again today. The content of my entire movie library DISAPPEARED this time and I am having to rescan it. This is going to take HOURS of work to repair.
Can a Plex team member PLEASE respond? What am I doing wrong!?
I discovered that I can stop Plex Media Server, copy one of the backed up SQLite databases containing my library information, and restart to restore all of my selections.
That said, I’d still like to know how to avoid this problem in the first place!
You have not shared anything about your server, so I can only make assumptions.
Like that your media files are not on an internal disk to the server machine and therefore may be late to respond because they are spun down or the network is not 100% available.
Try for starters to disable this option:
Settings - Server - Library - Empty trash automatically after every scan
Plex has recently introduced a new scanning agent, their own called Plex Scanner, which was previously Freebase. Could it have something to do with this? Maybe deleting the library, updating the Plex server, configuring the agents properly, and then recreating the library will do the trick?
Thanks for the help. I’ve disabled the option suggested by OttoKerner. My PMS is running on an iMac, and all of my media are on a Synology NAS that is mounted via autofs.
Thanks for the suggestions, folks. I would think that Plex Media Server would be a bit more resilient than this. I have had the same setup for well over a year, and haven’t experienced these issues until recently.
I’ll write a script that stops PMS, restores the database from the latest backup, and starts it up again. Sadly, recovery sounds easier than prevention for the time being 
This has nothing to do with resilience. PMS is simply doing what it is told.
- Library is triggered (either by a timestamp changing you or by a timer)
- PMS asks all data storage for a file list
- one or several disks are late to respond, therefore deliver only a partial answer
- PMS concludes that the items missing in the file list are now deleted
- due to the preference I told you about, it duly erses the items from its library
- later, the file storage becomes available again, PMS is now adding all those files in as if they were new
The clue lies in step 3. This usually happens if you run several disks in a JBOD configuration. If the disks are spun down for power saving, and upon access one of the disks is late to spin up, the NAS delivers only partial results. All files which are stored on the ‘lazy’ disk, are missing from the directory listing.
This won’t happen in a true RAID configuration. If you want to truly avoid it, deactivate the preference as advised or don’t let the disks in your NAS spin down.
