Issue with Plex overwriting source directory

[SevenDevilsClever]

EDIT: Please ignore this, it was poorly worded and I think is more confusing than my response down below. Apologies.


Ok, tonight I had some weird issues with Plex. First, how I have things setup:

All source directories to Plex (in this case /mnt/NAS_NAME/Movies) are added to Plex's Jail storage in /media/ (or /media/Movies for example). I have several source directories (TV_Shows, Movies, 3D movies, etc) all linked into Plex under /media/.

Today when I went to access one of the source directories (my Downloads folder) it instead showed a listing of all the directories listed under Plex's /media folder. So instead of showing various files I've copied into that directory from my other computers, it just shows empty directories of identical names to every share I created in Plex.

I rebooted my NAS a few times and nothing changed back. I even completely deleted the Plex plugin and rebooted still with no luck.

Is there anything else I can do / try to attempt to recover the files that were previously in the Downloads directory? I'm hoping its simply a matter of the CIFS share for the source directory (/mnt/NAS/Downloads) suddenly pointing to the wrong thing. I've double and triple checked to make sure the CIFS share was pointing to the correct volume, and it is, but it still shows the wrong content.

Any ideas?

P.S. Running FREENAS version FreeNAS-9.2.1.5-RELEASE-x64 (80c1d35)

 

[cyberjock]

Well, as soon as you went from talking about Plex to a download directory(hint: Plex has no "download" directory) and then to a CIFS share(hint: CIFS shares are inconsequential to Plex unless you are doing some very convoluted CIFS mapping to your jail/plugin) you lost me. I have no clue what you are even asking...

 

[SevenDevilsClever]

Sorry, had a feeling that came out badly.

I agree that the problem should be entirely unlikely, but here goes my second explanation:

I created a Volume for each different file type I'm storing (Movies / TV Shows / Downloads for the purposes of this example). Each volume was added into Plex as a source under /media/ (so it showed up like /media/Movies, /media/TV_Shows, and /media/Downloads).

Today when I accessed my Downloads volume over my network (via a CIFS share) all the files that were once in that volume were gone, and were replaced with the contents of my Plex Jail's /media/ directory (so instead of a series of folders and files all I saw was three empty directories: Movies, TV_Shows, and Downloads). Or at least, the contents of my Download volume now identically matched the contents of my Plex Jail's /media/ directory.

Nothing I've been able to do has been able to restore the contents of my Downloads volume. The CIFS share for my Downloads volume is correctly pointing to its location (/mnt/NAS/Downloads) and not the Plex Jail directory.

 

[cyberjock]

Hmm. I don't have any recommendations.

If you know how much data is on your pool you could do "zpool list" to see how much freespace is on your pool. If there's too much then your data is gone.

Other than that, I don't really have any recommendations as this sounds like a problem with user-error leading to lost files. Unfortunately you'd have to do some experimenting to figure out where the user-error was.

 

[SevenDevilsClever]

Its quite possible with the user-error, though I wouldn't have any idea how I managed it.

The only thing I had done recently was with the Plex plugin - I had some problems getting it to scan volumes I linked to it. I had everything shared to a /plex/ directory in the Plex Jail but due to some issues (I had shared things into /plex/ directly instead of into separate sub-folders like I'd meant) I moved and re-shared everything to a /media/ directory in Plex's Jail. Sharing the Downloads volume to Plex was the only new thing I had done with that particular volume. If there is a way to somehow wipe a volume by sharing it, I would dearly love to know. At this point I believe the data is permanently lost, so really what I'm attempting to do is figure out more or less what happened, and try to make sure I never do that again.

I did delete some of the impoperly shared directories in the /plex/ directory of the Plex Jail. Is there some way deleting shared directories in a jail will delete their source folders?

 

[cyberjock]

I did delete some of the impoperly shared directories in the /plex/ directory of the Plex Jail. Is there some way deleting shared directories in a jail will delete their source folders?

Absolutely.. that's why there's a big fat warning in the manual warning of this potential mistake.

 

[SevenDevilsClever]

Ahh, well then I will account myself lucky that I didn't manage to delete MORE of my stuff.

Also wish I had noticed that particular warning before hand, but at least now I know what I did.

Thanks!