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+--- Forum: General Questions (https://forum.jellyfin.org/f-general-questions)
+--- Thread: Data storage (/t-data-storage)
Data storage - Broom - 2025-09-10
I just uninstalled and reinstalled Jellyfin. I had to do this twice, because the first time I didn't get a clean uninstall, and the program wouldn't open properly.
So, the second time I deleted everything in my (Windows 10) Program Files/Jellyfin and Users/username/AppData/Local/Jellyfin* folders (the latter pattern matching three folders, IIRC). I had to reboot to delete the last of the files, in fact.
To my surprise, upon reinstall EVERYTHING was restored! This is contrary to an earlier experience when I first started out, where I lost my libraries, collections, and so forth.
My question is simply: WHERE is all this data stored? Did I miss some important folder in my C-drive somewhere? Is it ported to some cloud, and I forgot I gave it permission to do so? (And if so, where is that checkbox?)
TIA.
RE: Data storage - KodiUser1138 - 2025-09-10
ProgramData/Jellyfin is where all the data for your server is store. All the metadata, the library file, image cache, user photos, collections info and images etc.
When you did your un-install you were asked if you wanted to keep the Programdata folder which you must have said yes to. So it was all still there.
In the future, this is the directory you want to back-up incase of futher program issues , in order to do a full restore. It works, most of the time. Though depending how large your libraries are it may be a HUGE back-up with all the cached images. I suggest making back-ups of all the directories BUT the cached image ones since it doesn't take much time and space and the images can easily be rescanned anyways IF you have them saved with the actual media (as you should).
Unfortunately if you lose certain files from this directory then you need to rebuild that aspect in the future. Like users. There aren't files per individual user with their name, password, info, settings etc. That is all handled in some other file within the system.
And after a semi-recent change, you can't easily edit the Collections xml files to see immediate reflection in your Collections library.