I just scheduled super sonic analysis on my music collection. Selected the music folder and save changes. I’m then shown my music collection and “everything” has a solid red circle with an image of a garbage can on it. This to me indicates that everything is about to be wiped off the server. What happened ? I Didn’t select delete. How do I go about undoing whatever I just did ?
The image of the garbage can makes me nervous.
Three hours later, all my music files were deleted from my server.
The garbage can indicates that Plex tried to access / scan the files and couldn’t find them (either for individual files or an entire drive).
The fact that you see the trash can icon on items in Plex implies you had disabled the automatic emptying of the trash… which means Plex should keep its library information (manual edits, ratings…) — at least until you manually trigger „empty trash“ from the library context menu.
Plex itself doesn’t touch/change your files with two exceptions:
From what you’ve described it sounds more like some other process on your machine might have gone rogue. Sonic analysis doesn’t go around deleting your media.
This morning I went to the “Music” folder, and selected “Actions”. I then selected “Scan Library Files”. The music files began to reappear on my display. There is a difference now in how the files are displayed, compared to how it was previously displayed. All the artwork is gone. What now remains is a picture of the band members for the cover from which the tunes were ripped, instead of the cover artwork. And a few are displayed incorrectly. That’s not a big deal to me. I can fix most of that fairly easily. A few were custom-made though (kinda sorta). In the future, when something doesn’t look or feel right, is there a quick and easy way to cancel whatever actions are taking place at that moment ?
As for the automatic emptying of the trash, is that something I need to enable or keep disabled ? I can’t think of anything that needs to be automatically discarded. Help me understand the need for this function.
If you keep running into situations like this (or want to avoid them), you should set Empty trash automatically after scans to disabled. That way, even if Plex temporarily cannot find your media during a scan, none of your manual edits will be lost (unless you manually empty the trash).
If your media files all showed the trash can, then disappeared completely, then reappeared, that probably means that the folder that actually has all of those files is not consistently visible to Plex for some reason. For example if they are stored on another computer, if that computer was asleep or off, Plex would mark the files with the trash can meaning they are scheduled to be removed from the library.
As Tom said, Plex won’t delete your music itself. But if it cannot see those files all the time you will see that trash can keep showing up.
The option to automatically empty the trash is outstanding at generating forum posts by confused Plex users. (Only the Remote Access test light is more confusing!) Most people should turn this option off.
FWIW my advice is to prepare your files so that when scanned into Plex, you need to do as little hand-tweaking as possible. If you put a lot of time into Plex, manually selecting album covers, then it will be heartbreaking if the library is ever deleted. But if you get the results you want from scanning the files, because the tags, folder and filenames are all correct, then a re-do is much easier to swallow.
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