Hi at all,
will I have to re-assign media files or will plex immediately recognize the “old” drives again when I put them back into my PC without having to do metadata manually?
Precautions you might want to take before disconnecting the old drives:
- disable automatic library updates
- disable periodic library updates
- make sure that “Empty trash automatically after every scan” is disabled
- note down the drive letter which is currently assigned to each drive.
You will have to restore these drive letters after reconnecting the hard drives. Only after doing this I would risk a new library scan.
So, effectively Plex should not notice a change in the location of the media files it has in its database.
Too late, It does scan libraries immediately. Will it recognize the “old” drives (letters are the same) or will I have to recover my plex database from a file backup?
That depends on the state of the setting “Empty trash automatically after every scan”. If it’s still active, you will have to restore a database backup. (You should do that immediately.)
Unfortunately, “empty trash” has been set. So I have to restore if I don’t like the result from “auto scan” after the drives re-appear, right?
I wouldn’t wait until then. Just do it now, after disabling all of the above.
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will wait and see. still have the automatic database backups that are made every 3rd day.
Actually, you might be ok. If pms does not see the folder that the library points to, it will skip scanning that library and not do anything. So the files will not be tagged to be deleted and the empty trash won’t remove them.
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com.plexapp.plugins.library.db still has the same size as last week before HDD removal. so I guess Plex really did not care until now. HDDs will be back wednesday. will report then.
That is no safe indicator, because during its runtime, Plex server uses a “working copy” of the database file.
On top of that, after deletions the size of the DB file won’t change until a “vacuum” is performed. (which only happens occasionally and during server maintenance)
If you look at PMS now, without those drives, do you see them still listed but shown as “unavailable”. If so, then it is working as I mentioned above. When you put the drives back, as long as the paths haven’t changed, the files will become “available” again.
If you don’t see them listed in Plex now, then they were removed and they will be added back as new items.
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yes, those files are “unavailable”? I can see the drives are still listed in “media” as library source folders.
Call up the preplay page of some media items which are stored on these drives.
If they’re still listed, all is well.
You should see “File unavailable” if you inspect the plex media info of it.
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that is the case now. so should I disable automatic library updates and disable periodic library updates or leave it as is?
I’d say yes. Better safe than sorry.
plex recognized the reconnected HDDs without a problem. “unavailabe” media files are available again. no confusion due to disconnecting the drives.
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