63GB of files marked this am? Why is Plex eating up my hard drive space? Maybe its been accumulating for a while, but whatever is going on, its not acceptable.
I suspect that this is the Plex Desktop app. I disliked it when it was a Chrome app, but I hate the new app even more. Its slow, sluggish, and quirky in many spots. Even scrolling down movie lists its often pauses, play back is way worse (often glitchy, or stops for no reason, then jumps forward in fast forward mode to catch up), and sometimes it just dies and disappears.
Are you using the Plex app downloaded from the Windows Store? If so, did you sync to that application (possibly accidently)? I don’t have the store app installed anymore, but judging by the folder location inside packages it seems like the likely source…
Yes, the one from the Windows store since Plex discontinued the Chrome and native apps and basically left me no alternatives except the in browser one which has even bigger problems.
Its not the sync, but thanks for the suggestion. Sync location is set to a different drive, its limit is set to 16GB, and I don’t use sync on this device anyways as the actual server is sitting 2 feet away from me.
I’m guessing this is some kind of cache that isn’t getting cleared up but I’m afraid to delete it and corrupt things, and more importantly I need to stop it from recurring.
Interesting too is that the modified timestamps are all at a time that I was not even using Plex actively and was not at the PC - although the PC was on and the Plex app may have been open.
Could it be “video preview thumbnails” that are the issue?
You can check and see by clicking on the three dots … that appear when you hover over the library name on the main menu and choosing “edit” from the resulting menu. Then go to the advanced tab and see if “Enable video preview thumbnails” is checked and if it is you can uncheck it. You can also delete any existing video preview thumbnails from there.
Video preview thumbnails can take up a LOT of space. For me they are quite useful but I have a LOT of space on my Plex system drive and even then I do not enable them for TV shows.
You can also relocate the Plex data directory to a different local drive and that can save a lot of space on your primary drive.
Honestly, the Windows Store app hasn’t been updated in so long it’s not worth using. If you don’t want to use a browser based client, the Plex Media Player would be a better option. This is a regular win32 application you can download and install: https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/#plex-app
If it’s not a sync, I have no clue what would make that grow like that. Like I said above, it’s so out of date that I would ditch it anyway since it’s quite broken in most cases.
I will give that one a try. I just need something that works reliably. And the Store one doesn’t, and the browser based one has issues because of Chrome itself being a massive pig and eating all my RAM up often and requiring full restarts of all Chrome apps.
Hopefully Plex devs will jump in at some point…