It’s very frustrating that you cannot get actual technical support from anyone. When I logged into Plex today, the metadata in my TV shows was all messed up…covers were missing and collections were empty. How do you prevent this from happening and how do you save your data so that you dont lose months or years of time put into adding custom covers and collections? Most of the documentation and “common questions” are using jargon that I’ve never heard of…seems like this would be a pretty common issue! How do I save the metadata so that I wont lose all that work??
It’s not necessarily a common issue but it can happen under certain circumstances. The most frequent one will be a setup where 3 conditions come together:
your server is configured to do automatic or periodic scans (Settings > [Server Name] > Library > Scan my library automatically or Scan my library periodically)
your server is configured to automatically empty its trash after every scan (Settings > [Server Name] > Library > Empty trash automatically after every scan)
the drive/share with your media is occasionally not connected or takes too long to spin up when a scan happens
In such a situation Plex will update your library, clean out the “missing” media and re-catalog it during a subsequent scan (when the drives are back or spinning up fast enough). In consequence, the metadata and association to manually created collections will be deleted as well.
The basic failsafe for such a hiccup is to disable the Empty trash automatically after every scan – this way, even if a scan happens and Plex doesn’t find the media, it won’t delete the library entries. At worst they will show with an indicator that states the underlying files are not available (until you e.g. made sure the drives/shares are connected and accessible to your Plex Media Server).
With regards to your lost metadata there’s 2 considerations:
If your Mac has Time Machine enabled you might be able to restore the database files from there (while the PMS is stopped!!)
While a Time Machine restore might be easier to handle, it can also restore your database in a state right from when something else was changing/updating which can result in more corruption. Therefore… if you want to go that way, I recommend to go with #1.
