I’m having 2 separate problems that feel like they might have the same cause. The first issue is that some content that is physically present on the server (and has no trouble playing back) still shows that garbage can icon on the TV show cover art and a notification that it is “UNAVAILABLE”. Again - the content is present and all episodes of that TV Show are playable. It just SAYS they’re unavailable.
The second issue is that some files that I have manually deleted from different TV-shows on my hard drive isn’t being automatically removed from the PLEX. If I has 2 seasons of Gilligan’s Island on my source hard drive and I deleted them - I would expect Plex to just remove them from the database, instead it’s showing them as UNAVAILABLE. Which is understood - they are unavailable but I don’t need to see them on the server anymore.
Empty Trash ← removes unavailable files, i.e. red trash can
Clean Bundles ← removes unnecessary metadata from database
You can scan & empty trash of individual libraries, instead of entire server, if desired.
Use three dots to the right of the library name, instead of the server name.
Also available in Settings → Libraries
Clean Bundles also available in Settings → Troubleshooting
Empty Trash removes the file info from Plex. It does not delete the files from your system.
Super helpful! Thank you. I already tried using the “OPTIMIZE DATABASE” option as well as “CLEAN BUNDLES” in the SETTINGS → MANAGE → TROUBLESHOOTING section but I had no idea you could “empty trash” and never even saw those 3 dots next to the individual libraries. It would be great if those options were also listed under Troubleshooting.
It’s working on these tasks now, I’ll report back in a little while to see if the issues were fixed
I see the trash can on available media if I’ve done something like change the filename. When it rescans it marks it as gone, even though there’s a “new” copy in place. Doing Empty Trash fixes the unwanted indicator.
Thanks, guys! Had the same issue today (specifically with some removed, then restored media). Thought I’d had those automatically set, but did not. This fixed me up.
I encountered the Unavailable trash can after renaming some newly added files. By displaying the Get Info for the TV Episode, I noted that it showed 2 files. One was correct and the other was the previous name of the file and that one was marked with an Unavailable flag. To fix this, I copied the existing file, renamed it to the original name. Rescanned the library. Checked Get Info to make sure that both file names now showed as available for the TV Episode. I then deleted the old file and again re-scanned the library. The Get Info should now only show a single file attached to the TV Episode and the Unavailable flag should no longer be present.
