Prevent PMS from marking all media as “Recently Added” after brief SMB disconnect?

Plex Media Server
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Server Version#: 1.42.0.9975
Player Version#: 10.30.2.3548

I’m running Plex Media Server on a Mac, with media stored on a Synology NAS. The NAS shares are mounted via SMB, and everything works smoothly — until the network connection is interrupted (e.g., NAS reboot, brief network drop, etc.).

When the shares reconnect, which happens automatically, Plex treats everything in every library as newly added. The “Recently Added” sections for both TV and Movies get flooded with older content that’s been there for years. Then there’s the extra load on the computer reprocessing everything from scratch.

Is there a way to stop this? A setting I’m missing? I rely on “Recently Added” to track actual new content, so it’s frustrating to lose that (and take a performance hit) just because the media was briefly unavailable.

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If enabled, disable Settings → Library → Empty trash automatically after every scan.

If Plex scans the library when the shares are disconnected, it will mark the media as unavailable, but it will not remove the items from the library.

When the shares are re-established and Plex scans the library then the media will be marked as available.

1 Like
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Assuming that fixes it, I owe you a beer – even if you are a Ford guy. THANKS!

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@FordGuy61 Just wanted to confirm that changing that one setting has indeed fixed my issue. It’s been plaguing me for months, and I just didn’t want to deal with it. I looked at all the settings a hundred times, but it never clicked to uncheck that box.

Also wanted to mention that this issue prompted me to look into better ways of stabilizing the connection between my Mac and Synology. Both are hardwired and sitting within inches of each other, and I had always used SMB to mount the Synology shares as volumes. That meant adding them to my Mac’s login items and running third-party software to remount them if they disconnected.

While researching alternatives, I discovered autofs (already part of macOS; that’s just a link to more information) and switched to NFS instead, mapping the shares to the same paths I had used for SMB. That meant I didn’t have to update anything in Plex or other apps that access those folders. I also created a LaunchAgent to make sure the shares are mounted right away at startup — before Plex tries to access them. That let me finally get rid of the third-party software I was using to keep the mounts alive. Might do a writeup on this if no one else has already. (EDIT: Someone else has already done this, though their steps are much more complicated than necessary.)

Plex now seems faster and (hopefully) more stable than ever. Thanks again for the help!

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