TV Shows Removed then Re-Added as Brand New Additions when Deleting Duplicates from Secondary Drive

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 4.116.1 (most likely N/A since this has been happening for a while now under older versions)
Player Version#: N/A

I have a relatively simple Plex Server with 2 x 16 TB HDDs.
I didn’t want to set UP any kind of RAID/UnRAID/JBOD or anything else so Each Drive is more or less independently from the other.

I store TV Shows on both Drives & have the Two Paths listed in my TV Shows Library in Plex
Due to needing to Re-Balance those Drives, I have Copied multiple Shows from one Drive to another, wanting to delete the Original Copies from the Original Drive once the New Copies are detected & added as valid Episode/File locations.

Plex does detect & process those Files without issues, listing both the Original & Duplicate.

But as soon as the Original Files get deleted, the show gets removed from the Library & is then Re-Added/Re-Scanned as a Brand New Addition, with all Play Counts reset.

What, if anything, can I do to prevent this from happening?

Thanks

2

After you’ve copied the next item(s) to the other drive,
do these copies appear as separate items or are they merged under the same poster as the original ones?
If they appear as their separate poster, they may have been matched to a different metadata agent.
Which in turn suggests that the original library is in a state where the default metadata agent has been changed, but all the already existing items haven’t been converted yet to use this new default agent.
The solution is to perform Refresh Metadata on the whole library before moving any items between drives.

A second possibility is that they have lost their {edition} tag. Which can happen if you only added that manually, but haven’t included it into the file name.

3

After being Copied, they are merged under the same poster & are recognized as Duplicates if filtering for Duplicates in the Library.

4

That’s exactly how it should be.
Once they are recognized as copies, you can remove the “originals”, then scan library again, then empty trash.

5

I understand that this is the expected behavior.
In reality, on my server, Deleting the Originals causes the entire show to temporarily disappear, then be re-added as Brand New…

It’s as if it forgets about the existence of the fully recognized Duplicate files as soon as the Original Files are deleted.

6

Is it possible that the duplicate is named so ambiguously that it is recognized at first as something different?

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