Today, after a power outage, my server (Centos-7) rebooted with an unhappy plex. I soon discovered that Preferences.xml file was empty. Luckily, I take a full backup of my Plex set-up every night, so it was a fairly easy task to restore and get everything working again.
Doing a quick search, it seems that this isn’t necessarily a regular occurrence, but it does seem to happen from time to time. And recovery from this issue is a little more nuanced if you don’t have a backup readily available. Just wondering if Plex should automatically keep a backup copy available, and revert to that if on start-up the Preferences.xml file is found to be empty?
I’ve had the same thing happen to me after a power outage, ended up with an empty Preferences.xml file. Unfortunately, I had no backup copy at the time. If I recall, I had to go through the whole configure and server claim process.
Of course now, I make my own regular backups of this file.
This is something that anyone who runs a server should manage. Plex does create regular database backups as that is far more likely to corrupt. but for preferences.xml admins should create backups regularly
I don’t disagree that admins should create backups regularly. This is what I do, but there are a lot of people who don’t. I personally wasn’t aware, before it happened to me, that my preferences.xml could be wiped after a crash. I suspect most people don’t know this, so won’t be specifically backing up this file. If it seems to be a possibility, and Plex already creates regular database backups, then why can’t it also create regular backups of this file? It would save a lot of pain for users who need to figure out how to get their Plex server back up and running.
I have an APC UPS connected to USB to the server wth APCUPSD running.
When the power goes down, apcupsd does an orderly shutdown of the server before battery power is exhausted.
There was a UPS on my server a while ago…until the UPS started failing and was causing more issues than it was supposed to prevent. So currently - there is no UPS.
Every 3-4 years, my UPS battery needs replacing. I have a lot of outages during winter. (It beeps to let me know it’s due). This is normal wear & tear on the battery.
For me, a RB-17 replacement battery is less than 1/2 the cost of a new UPS.
It’s worth reconsidering.
If you only get 10 minutes of runtime, at least its enough to get an orderly shutdown and prevent corruption of the filesystem (and your RAID storage)
