Been a while | Good News

Hello (there (everyone)),

It’s been a considerable amount of relative radio silence on my end.

Fortunately, I have been able to take some much needed time to dedicate towards making some changes I’ve either had in mind or had already had started implementing at some point up until now.

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For a considerable amount of time, I’ve been aware of and attempting to come up with a solution to the inescapable issue of maintaining available storage space.

While the full size of the array is indeed nothing to sneeze at, this is not enough to sustain indefinitely, it is enough to allow for a sizable buffer of floating free storage space that would be used as requests require. Some of our very early users will recall a time of great plenty in which the requests system was not bound by any form of limit, be it an entire TV series years in the making, a single season, a single episode or an entire movie franchise, all were free to request to their hearts’ content. Eventually, as the number of users increased, requests became overwhelming and unmanageable, hence the limitations being initially introduced. This was at a time when the systems in place used substantially less capable hardware on a connection easily saturated by a few concurrent streams.

This project has indeed come a very long way and as a funnel for my passion, I’ve come to see that from humble beginnings, the ongoing support and feedback from the user community was the primary source of forward momentum and motivation to continue refining, developing and improving the system/environment we see before us today.

Abandoned Media Pruning

The last two times there was a large crunch in terms of available storage space for new media, where the solution deemed appropriate was to basically nuke most of the libraries content and start from scratch via requests as the prompts to what should be added. This works, but rather unilaterally with regards to the fact that the solution is rather scorched earth and not really appropriate for the kind of media server I imagined myself running.

As such, after a good amount of searching, testing, double-checking and assuring myself of nothing catastrophic occurring as a result of the effort, a series of scripts have been put in place that will allow for a combination of information sources in the network currently will come together to pool their statistical resources and determine, based on the criteria I ended up settling on as will be discussed shortly, to systematically delete media deemed “abandoned” simply meaning it was not watched within x amount of days by anyone.

At this time, the script will strictly be run manually and not unattended. Given the assurances I’ve displayed to myself over the last little while, I do have faith that the script(s) will act as intended, something about creating, using and implementing a script that is designed to delete data feels very fundamentally wrong given my data hoarding tendencies.

Below you will find a breakdown of the results of the execution of the script(s) and the criteria that the script uses to determined which data to delete upon any given execution.

Affected Library	Scenarios	Thresholds
TV Shows Movies	– Days since any Plex user viewed the content exceeds…	500 days
TV Shows Movies	– Days since media has been added and no Plex user has viewed the content exceeds…	180 days

Due to the applications and scripts involved, the limitation I found that became apparent is that the only statistics everything would “talk to” another in a streamlined fashion were from Plex usage. That being said, the same statistics indicate that Plex is the more heavily utilized platform between Plex and Jellyfin.

Media that users wish to exclude from the routine usage of the media deletion scripts can make use of the new “Issue” category on the requests page, “Request Pruning Protection”. Simply raise an issue for the content you wish to exclude from removal regardless of watch statistics.

Initial dry runs of the scripts have yielded approximately 14 TB of TV Shows marked for removal and 13 TB of Movies making for a total reclamation of 27 TB on the first runs.

So…If any of your media disappears suddenly. Just go ahead and request it again, requests have already been set to unlimited. Be reasonable and enjoy!