Radarr/Plex Files Randomly Gone

I just went to watch a movie and my server said it wasn't there, so I went and check the PC folders and all of my movies are gone. Not in any of the recycling bins, not anywhere, just gone. What would have caused this? How do I stop it from happening again? It's been working fine for months then this just happened.

19 comments

Radarr has a setting which will delete files when a movie becomes unmonitored. By any chance did you recently unmonitor everything or make a change to whole directory like rescanning ?
- I did unmonitor everything recently. For fuck sakes didn't know it did that. Just thought what's the point in monitoring the movies if they're all how I want them. Apparently I fucked myself.
  
  Maybe you've seen the comments above but might not be the case.
- Eek where is this setting? I see the setting to unmonitor when deleted but not the other way around.
  
  Like you, I don't see that setting, and only see the one you see. I don't think it exists. I think they just had it backwards.
  It makes no sense to delete movie files when clicking unmonitor.

Here's a link to the last few logs from Radarr.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-XXanIlVfbpry3Qopf_Gtw3KrjsVLavY

Is it all on a single drive? The logs mention E:/Movies missing.
The E indicates a different drive, if you're in windows. So is that disk still available?
- I have movies and anime on one drive and tv shows on another. E is still available

HDDs can randomly crap out and cause some... interesting... glitches as they do. Can you check SMART stats or something? If there's been significant malfunction, it should show up there.
- The HDD is less than a year old so I'd be less than impressed if it crapped out. I'll take a look and see what it says.
  
  They are most likely to fail when newish (<1yr) and at age.

I'm not sure, the logs only mention E:\Movies folder is missing or not being available/accessible (permission issues? Wrong hard drive?).
Something may have happened before the logs were made, or by another application/service service running on your system.
Hopefully it will help you find the source of the error.

There's hope. Try recuva (works on windows). Stop using those drives. No data is deleted, ever. Only the spaces is marked as available, and data is overwritten. While we are at it, this also means that if you really want to delete a file the actual process is overwriting it several times and then do the OS "deletion". There are tools for that too, most are aptly named as file shredders. Good luck!
- I did end up using recuva and it was able to recover about 3/4 of it. A lot got corrupted somehow. But I was able to save myself some downloading. Still no idea what caused it.

Do any of your plex users have the permissions required to delete files?
Radarr doesn't delete video files unless replacing them with a new one, or commanded to delete them. It will delete related metadata files like images, subtitles, and nfo when it thinks a video file has been deleted though.
Your logs repeat with root folder 'E:/Movies' was not found while trying to import new media, but doesn't mention anything else. Does that folder still exist, or was it also deleted? All your movies, or just some? Were other libraries modified? (tv shows)
- The folder is still there, all of the movies were removed. Shows on the same drive were not. No users with permissions to do anything.

19 comments