Why did my TV Shows Library randomly rebuild itself

General Discussions
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1

So, I noticed that my Plex server has been screaming all morning constantly hitting 100% cpu utilization, etc, and it looks like what has been happening, is that it arbirarily decided to rebuild my entire TV Shows library.

It’s treating EVERYTHING like it was newly added to the library, I got “new on deck” messages for every show I haven’t finished, even ones that have been long dismissed from my watch later and ones that have NOT had new episodes added in months to years.

It has wiped out all of my custom posters, and once again selects the random one that Plex assigns which look terrible, but I’ve grown used to this behaviour from Plex, however this time it’s ALSO removing them from my collections.

This is ridiculous, and will probably take hours to fix between the posters on every season and the collections for my 100+ TV shows. I’ve got to say, I’ve been relatively happy with Plex and have been paying for the pro service, this is the first time I’ve needed technical support I feel like and when I saw their answer to needing it is basically “ask the community!” I’ve never been closer to saying “screw this, time to set up JellyFin” than I have been right now.

I’d like to know why this may have happened and what can be done to prevent it, I do NOT want this to happen to my 1,500 movies and the posters and collections I have in place for those.

2

What is the current value of Settings → [Select Your Server Name] → Library → Empty trash automatically after every scan?

There are circumstances under which, with the above setting enabled, if media is temporarily unavailable for whatever reason. and the library is scanned during that time, references to that media will be removed from your Plex library. When the media becomes available again and a subsequent scan is performed, it will be seen as having been freshly-added to the library.

It’s unfortunate but it does happen. Particularly when external drives or network attached storage is used. For example, transient network issues could cause media stored on a NAS device to be temporarily unavailable.

Disabling the above setting (described in this support article) will help mitigate this by leaving the library references intact in the event of issues.

3

Disable the above mentioned setting, then
Restore a database backup from before the incident.