Storage Indicator | Upcoming Mass Stale Media Removal | Request Protections

If you’ve made it this far, then you’ll likely have already seen the first item in the title of this post on the left side of the webpage.

That’s right, every 5 minutes, we do a quick query and send a update if it’s changed between the media server hardware and the dev blog here. Why every 5 minutes? Well, requests will spike the usage of storage particularly if it’s an entire set of files rather than the day to day on and off traffic of keeping things up to date.

Without expressly mentioning the available and utilized storage numbers themselves but providing a percentage and traffic-light style indicator system, you will be able to gauge how close we are to a stale content purge, which brings us to our next order of business in this post, the upcoming stale media purge. If you recall or were already a member when this post went up, then it’ll be more of the same for you.

Here is the same breakdown from the prior purge as the thresholds have not changed since.

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

With regards to how the script identifies what constitutes any given piece of media, it is via the TVDB (TV Shows) or TMDB (Movies) as associated based on media type. Meaning specifically for TV Shows, if any episode of a series has been viewed within the thresholds, that entire series will be safe from pruning. If none of the entire contents of a TV series has been watched since it was added to the server, it will, as a whole be pruned. TV Shows are treated as a collective of all media under that show/series title. (Good questions, CatfishSoupFTW)

Now, for the last topic I’ll cover related to the yet to be scheduled stale media pruning script execution.

One of my concerns when making use of a script for data deletion, aside from the fact that..well…it would delete data, was that let’s say you have a staple piece of media in your mind, will you need to re-request it every time it gets pruned despite watching it once a year but not meeting the threshold that way? I’d prefer not. So, if that is the case or you simple don’t want to wait for the system to re-acquire your favorite long running TV series. To request an exclusion or immunity from stale media purges, you may put in an issue under that piece of media under the category called “Content Pruning Exception Request” and I’ll add it’s TVDB or TMDB ID into the exclusion list.

Stay tuned for more!

UPDATE: The script will likely be run in this current month as we approach near complete utilization rapidly.

-LST