I have been running Plex on a Windows 7 computer for years… I’m contemplating upgrading to a new computer, but may migrate to an SSD first, so I’m trying to read up and prepare for what’s to come…
I currently have, “The path where local application data is stored” set to: E:\Plex_Data
While poking around in E:\Plex_Data, I noticed that E:\Plex_Data\Plex Media Server\Updates is about 10GB. I’m guessing that has saved every version since it has been able to self-upgrade…? (That seems overkill.) I’m assuming that it’s safe to delete all of these directories with old versions, but was hoping someone could confirm?
Next I noticed that E:\Plex_Data\Plex Media Server\Logs is about 4GB. Is it safe to delete all logs that are not from this year? (I assume that the Dashboard feature that displays metrics is making DB queries, but want to make sure that it’s not making use of any of the logs I would like to delete.)
Finally, I don’t believe any of my clients are able to make use of index files - at least, I don’t notice them being used anywhere (Roku and Apple TV 4K), so I just decided to disable, “Generate video preview thumbnails” and “Generate chapter thumbnails” and would like to delete any index files that have already been created… I came across these two old posts:
but, when I ran the SELECT SQL query to find references to them in my DB, it only found 85, so I’m wondering if those instructions are out of date, since I have thousands of movies and tv shows in my library, and have had those features on, “as a scheduled task and when media is added” for months, if not more than a year now (I think I enabled it when I got my latest ATV, since I was hoping it would make FF/REW nicer - but it didn’t), so it seems like it should be matching more?
You can emtpy out both the Updates and the Logs folder.
(You might wanna retain the last 1 or 2 versions of the Plex installer from the Updates folder though – just in case.)
There is no need to mess around with the database anymore.
Deleting video previews is now possible in the properties of each library. Edit your library, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab, ‘Delete Preview Thumbnails’
Hey @OttoKerner - thanks for confirming my thoughts about the updates and logs - and yes, I’ll follow your suggestion and keep a couple of previous updates, just in case!
I found the, “Delete Preview Thumbnails” options in each library that you mentioned - turned out that only my DVR library had them enabled… maybe that’s why they never seemed to, “work/help” on my clients, after I updated the main server config to enable them (I don’t watch the DVR content much - mostly use my tuners for live news, etc.). Guess I can play around with them a bit more now to see… Do you happen to know if the main Settings > Library options related to video preview and chapter thumbnails are simply the defaults that a new library inherits? (I always seem to get tripped up when there are similar settings in the main server config as well as in each library!
AFAIK the two settings are independent, and the default is now to enable them on newly created libraries.
However, the check box was not activated retroactively when the feature was introduced. So if your library is already a few years old, the feature didn’t exist when they were created.
