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+++ title = 'Disappearance of my Plex Server' date = 2024-09-03T19:00:00-05:00 tags = ["plex", "incident_report", "unraid"] +++
In order to celebrate the long weekend, I was going to take it easy with my Homelab tasks (hence the lack of posts over the couple of days) and just watch some shows I've got stored on my Plex. I logged on to my Plex, but my libraries are nowhere to be found. This sent me into a bit of a panic as I just spent CAD $2.5k to ensure I'd have some redundancy on my media files. Of course, they could easily be redownloaded but it would be such a pain in the ass that I'd rather not.
To my relief, all of the media files are all there. But when I checked the Docker volume where Plex is supposed to store all of its Library metadata, it's all empty. There's only one culprit to this: I've hit the apply all updates button on unRAID just a few days prior. All of the healthchecks failed to catch this particular incident, as the server is up. It's just that the configurations its supposed to have is gone.
To this date, I am still stumped as to why on earth a simple update would wipe the Library metadata folder. I have never had this happened before when I was hosting it via Portainer. And the configurations I have on unRAID is identical to what I have previously. All of those Library metadata should be stored and persisted in the cache pool.
Thankfully, I still have the backup folder from when I was moving over the metadata from my decommissioned OMV server over to my new one. It was missing some settings (which is worthy of a post of its own later), but it still contains a good chunk of the metadata I'd rather not configure from scratch again.
Downside is that I had taken this backup from a just over a month ago, so all of the data recorded since then have been lost to the void. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but is definitely unacceptable if I want to open this server up for more friends and family to use.
So just a cautionary tale for me and to any of you reading: Take backups before doing updates! Especially on unRAID which I'm unfamiliar with how it manages its Docker containers and updates. I might very well just have to setup a cron job that will periodically zip up this Library folder and store it somewhere.