I made a catastrophic error when moving to my new server instance and ended up wiping my old database. I have rebuilt my libraries and everything is up as expected but my watched data was empty.
I have checked and confirmed that I had " Sync Your Watch State and Ratings" enabled and when I open a show I do see the “Activity by you” which if I select will show the show as watched.
Is there any way to have that translate to the show being marked as watched? Other than manually seeing what shows activity and marking those episodes as “watched”?
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Did you have Sync enabled on your server before the move? Did you have it on for at least a day?
How long did you wait after install to post? I believe sync watch data can take time to propagate from the Plex cloud back down to your server. It’s probably less than an hour, but if I used the feature, I’d wait at least until a day (maintenance period) to check.
Thank you for the reply.
Yes, I had the Sync on for quite some time (I believe since it was first an option)
My server has been back online for about a week and I do see my watched activity if I drill down on a show and select the “activity by…” I will show on some shows “Activity by you” and sometimes my activity and the activity of others I have shared with. So it does look like my server is getting the watched data back.
The only issue is this doesn’t mark the show as watched…
A quick example in case I am not explaining it well enough:
Prior to the server move I was watching the (made up for this example) show “Complete the puzzle” which has 10 seasons and I had watched 9 all the way through and the first 3 (out of 10) of the current season.
When I went into Plex I would see the check mark on all previous seasons and if I opened season 10 I would show the checkmark on the first 3 of season 10 and episode 4 would be in my “on deck” area.
Since the move, all 10 seasons are showing without a checkmark, but if I open the series on the new server I see “Activity by you” and if I select that it will have a line for each episode I’ve watched.
I can manually mark the seasons and episodes as watched using this data if that is necessary I was just wondering if that was “functioning as intended” or should I expect the shows to show as watched?
I think you’re on to something that I have suspected for a while. I made this topic a while back: Many items I have marked as watched has been removed from my profile but it got ignored.
Something seems off with the implementation with this. They made a change to separate certain watched states and since then, there can be a disparity between your database and what Plex has synced. It seems intentional but I don’t see the logic. I hope you get help because I have been worried that the sync wouldn’t really work when I need it too.
Did you enable the option on the new server?
That setting is an account setting not a server setting.
That being said, yes it is still enabled at the account level
If there is a server setting as well, I haven’t found it.
Scanning through the Sync Watch State article, it is indeed an account-level setting. I turned it off when it was announced, as it did behavior that ruined my use of the Watchlist (I use that list as a “reminder” to watch something, but with sync state enabled it deletes the item from the list when I watch it).
It should sync the state within 30 minutes of activity, so all I can think of is that you either deleted all your state data, or weren’t somehow syncing before you made the new server…
It has some caveats, such as requiring a specific version of server (I think it’s a version from when this was implemented years ago, and shouldn’t be THAT out of date), but also making sure to be using the Plex agent, and having refreshed metadata recently. All of this I doubt you are doing, as not using the latest agent the server will NAG THE HECK out of you.
Thanks for the clarification. I thought there was a server setting.
Next thing to check is watch something then wait 5 minutes and check the server logs.
I think the thing that is being missed about my situation is that the watched data is there - it just isn’t marking the shows as watched.
Let’s say I have a movie called “Happy Golfer” that I watched on my old Plex instance,
on my new Plex instance, if I select the movie it is NOT showing as watched, if I do a search (or API call) for unwatched movies it will show “Happy Golfer” in the list. But when I select the movie, between the synopsis and the video / audio / subtitle details it will show “Activity by You” and if I select that it shows You watched “Happy Golfer” January 18, 2022
It sees I’ve watched it it lists it under activity but it does not mark the movie as watched which is what will prevent it from suggesting the movie to me.
TV Shows are more annoying, If I had watched 3 of the 5 seasons it will show nothing as watched but if I drill down and look at the activity it will show Activity by You" and list each of the episodes I’ve watched.
It’s now been a few weeks since I set up the new server so i am losing hope that it will ever actually mark them as watched.
I did turn on debug and I do see, when I finish watching something the /ViewStateSync “sending state” lines so that is also working and I have not changed.
If there was a way within the API calls to grab the “Activity by You” data I would just write something to update the watch state using the activity data but I don’t believe the activity data is accessible. If it is and I’m just missing it that would be great news. Otherwise I think I just have to accept that the sync data either doesn’t work as described or I have misunderstood how it in intended to work.
At the end of the day, I was the person who screwed up the copy of the DB file to the new server, I created this issue for me, I was hopeful that the Sync data would save me but it appears that this is just another example of how I should sleep before making major changes to my servers.
Yeah, looking at the documentation, it mentions a difference between “Watch Activity” and “Watch State”. However, it also mentions that the sync is SUPPOSED to do both: Mark an activity that you watched it, AND mark it as watched. Might be a bug, if you make a new server and it fails to take the “Activity” and update your watch state too.
Since it has “Watch Activity”, it really does seem to me that it should take that and update the “Watch State” as well. Hey, @BigWheel , are we insane, or are a person’s watch states supposed to be updated on a new server or not?
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Plex TV only sync the “view state” and the date it was created. This is like a 1 or a 0 flipped at some time. it does not sync the “Activities”
When the view state is synced to Plex.tv as “watched” ( whether by actually watching or marking) it also creates an activity that appears as “Activities by you”, activity feed and in the Watch History on profile that is only stored at Plex.tv. That state could be viewed even if a server was deleted by looking up a movie in via Discover’s More Ways to Watch and it would display the current state for that account. Watch Activities have never been synced back to the server. You can manually delete individual activities ( there could be 10 watched activities for the same movie every time you watched it or marked it as watched). Deleting the activity will not change the state.
When something is marked as “Unwatched” for whatever reason, that is synced and becomes the new current view state but past the Watched Activities remain. It does not create an activity of unwatched. Meaning something can be unwatched even though it has existing past watched activities.
When a new server is installed it will update with the whatever the current state at Plex.tv. as new server would not have any state stored. For an existing server when view state syncing is enabled for account, it will compare the view state at Plex.tv with the view state on server on the server will sync/keep whichever is newer. (Same if you restored a old DB because a new one got corrupted and the states did not match)
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Thank you for the explanation @BigWheel I’ll stop focusing on the activity as that appears to be a red herring.
I did go to Plex.TV and search for a TV Show I know I had watched and is showing as unwatched on my server and confirmed it is showing as watched on Plex.TV.
I built my new server on June 9th and it has been constantly up since then in case there is a possibility that I just need to wait longer. If not, is there anything I can do to ask my server to “check again”?
I should not take that long. I would guess either some sort of connection issue or some issue writing to the server database. Look in your logs for ViewStateSync and check for errors. This would happen pretty much anytime someone with access to server watched something. Feel free to message me logs and I can ask devs to take a look.
Thanks for posting this. I’ve got exactly the same issue. I’m glad you mentioned that you can still see the watch history because now realise that the history is there. But, the same as you, when I decommissioned my old server it was as if I was starting anew, with no shows and movies marked as watched, despite them being the exact same files. I’ve checked and I had such state and history on as well. So something had gone wrong here. Has this been raised as a bug somehow?
I will check the logs as suggested as soon as I can.
I see I have this error a lot:
ul 02, 2025 15:06:02.449 [139813614201656] DEBUG - [ViewStateSync] Starting
Jul 02, 2025 15:06:02.449 [139813614201656] DEBUG - [ViewStateSync] Fetching user tokens
Jul 02, 2025 15:06:02.450 [139813614201656] DEBUG - [ViewStateSync/HCl#98f] HTTP requesting GET https://plex.tv/api/v2/server/users/services?auth_token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Jul 02, 2025 15:06:03.309 [139813683743544] DEBUG - [HttpClient/HCl#98f] HTTP/1.1 (0.9s) 200 response from GET https://plex.tv/api/v2/server/users/services?auth_token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Jul 02, 2025 15:06:03.310 [139813608635192] DEBUG - [ViewStateSync] Failed to get new tokens; aborting
Jul 02, 2025 15:06:06.884 [139813705456440] DEBUG - Jobs: ‘/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Media Fingerprinter’ exit code for process 96869 is 0 (success)
