Windows 10 symlinks to files are not followed

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.21.1.3876

I have a Plex Media Server installation on Windows 10 and I’ve noticed that it does not import symbolic links into the Library. I would like to sort of reopen this issue reported earlier.

In my case I have media files shared with me via Google Drive and I am not in charge of the file names. The shared Google Drive is mounted as a network drive under Windows. The file names have a format that’s not recognized by the Plex Media Server when the files are imported into a Library. To avoid matching all entries manually I’ve written a small script that automatically creates symbolic links to the original files. The symbolic links follow a naming pattern that’s compatible with the Plex Media Server.

When I add the directory containing the correctly named symbolic links to my Library, it lists all the files but none of them gets imported. This, I think, is a ridiculous bug in the Plex Media Server as the files are otherwise visible everywhere else in Windows. Also, as it’s pointed out in the linked topic, a symbolic link to a directory works, the files are imported as expected. It doesn’t help in my case, though, as I have to rename the files and I need individual links to every single file.

I would really appreciate if the developers working on the Windows version of the Plex Media Server fixed this problem. The Linux version works as expected but replacing my Windows installation with Linux is not an option for me.

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I’m on Linux and I’ve also encountered the issue where Plex does not follow symbolic links. I have all my movies on a separate hard drive and Plex does not load off any drive except the main one. So I tried adding a symbolic link at ~/Movies to my movies and Plex does not see it.
Very frustrating.

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I have a Plex Media Server installed on Ubuntu as well and I can confirm that on Linux it works: the Plex server follows the symlinks correctly to both directories and individual files.

Can you double check that there are no typos in the symlinks and the file permissions of the source files and of the destination directory (where the symlinks are) are all correct?

  • Symlinks can be created to non-existent paths so make sure that this is not the case.
  • The user (or its group) running the Plex Media Server should have at least read access (r) on the movies, and read and execute access (rx) on every directory along the path to the movies.
  • It should also have read and execute access (rx) on every directory leading to the symlinks.
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Hard Links on Windows only work within the same NTFS volume. i.e. symlinks from a network share to a different hard drive won’t work.

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@OttoKerner I have a problem with symbolic links (soft links), not hard links. Symlinks do work across different drives. As an Administrator, I have created a symlink in my home folder to an MKV file which is on a mounted network drive (Y:):

C:\Users\some_user>mklink some_movie.mkv Y:\feature_films\some_movie.mkv

The symlink is visible to the system: it shows up in the File Explorer and when I double-click it, the default Movies & TV app plays the file normally.

I also created a symlink to a folder on the same mounted network drive:

C:\Users\some_user>mklink /D feature_films Y:\feature_films

Again, the (soft-)linked folder and its content are visible to Windows: the files are properly listed in File Explorer, and I can, for example, copy the files from the symlinked folder to a different location.

This latter use case - the symlinked folders - work in the Plex Media Server as well. I can add the linked folder to the Library and its content gets imported. The problem I am facing is releated to the first use case (symlink to a file): the Plex Media Server on Windows 10 doesn’t appear to be able to import such files to the Library, even though everywhere else they work flawlessly.

To be specific, here’s what the directories and files look like on my Windows 10 desktop running the Plex Media Server:

  • A shared Google Drive folder is mounted on drive Y:.
  • The Y: drive contains different directories - feature films, TV shows, documentaries, etc - all coming from the shared Google Drive folder. Let’s focus on the content of the feature_films folder.
  • The feature_films folder contains a bunch of MKV files with non-standard filenames (non-standard in the context of Plex), such as 21_jump_street.2012.some-additional-stuff-that-confuses-the-plex-agent.mkv, or 300_rise_of_an_empire.2014.mk3d (unrecognized file extension). Because of such non-standard filenames the Plex agent can’t match the movies automatically, everything needs to be fixed manually. Files with an unsupported extension can’t even be imported.
  • To avoid manually matching ~2k movies and to be able to import, for example, *.mk3d files, I’ve written a little command line tool that automatically creates soft links to the original files on Google Drive (in the Y:\feature_films folder) where the names of the soft links are compatible with the Plex agent. For example:
    C:\Users\some_user>mkdir feature_films
C:\Users\some_user>cd feature_films
C:\Users\some_user\feature_films>mklink 21_jump_street.2012.mkv Y:\feature_films\21_jump_street.2012.some-additional-stuff-that-confuses-the-plex-agent.mkv
C:\Users\some_user\feature_films>mklink 300_rise_of_an_empire.2014.mkv Y:\feature_films\300_rise_of_an_empire.2014.mk3d
...
    Next I add the C:\Users\some_user\feature_films folder to the Library but the Plex Media Server doesn’t import any of the files as if the added folder was completely empty (even though in the Library window, where the folder was added, the content of the folder was correctly listed).
  • As already described above, if I make a symbolic link to the Y:\feature_films folder:
    C:\Users\some_user>mklink /D feature_films Y:\feature_films
    and then I again add the C:\Users\some_user\feature_films folder to the Library, then the Plex Media Server imports all the movies but the MKV file names are not Plex-compatible so nothing is matched automatically by the Plex agent.

So what I’d like the Plex Media Server to do is to import individual soft links to files on another drive.

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