Seeking Advice: Managing a Large Media Library with Limited Jellyfin Server Storage

[E4ntrail]

Where do you keep your "offline media" at?

Currently, all my media is stored on a simple external 8TB HDD. When I want to access the movies and shows personally, I attach it to my laptop and start a Jellyfin Docker container. 

My VPS is a 2.4TB server that I also use for other purposes like Nextcloud and other applications. As a result, I can only allocate 500-800GB to movies and shows on the VPS. 

Seems like maybe rclone with a FTP mount could solve your entire situation.

That’s a great idea if the media were on a NAS or similar. Unfortunately, in my case, the media is stored on an external HDD that I manually plug into my laptop when needed. 

Theoretically, I could rent a Hetzner storage box for around €20/month and set up an SFTP mount, but I’d prefer a simpler, cost-free solution. 

### My Current Approach
My goal is to allow the five users of my Jellyfin instance to: 
1. Watch movies and shows currently available on the Jellyfin server. 
2. Scroll through my entire collection of movies and shows, including those stored offline. 

To achieve this, I’ve set up four library folders as described in my original post. This setup allows users to distinguish between content that’s available for streaming and content that’s only available offline. 

### The Challenge
The main issue is that when I rotate content (removing available movies or shows to make space for new requests), Jellyfin deletes all user-specific metadata related to the removed titles (e.g., watched statuses, favorites). 

Ideally, I’d like a way to merge the user-title metadata from the actual movie in the "Movies" library with the corresponding placeholder in the "Movies_Clone" library, so this metadata is preserved even when the actual video file is removed. 

So essentially my question is, if there is already some existing way of merging the metadata between two Library folders, or if anyone could think of another approach to solve this issue retaining the metadata. Theoretically one could use trakt, which i also would like to avoid though.