Jellyfin deleted 2.5tb of my personal data without prompt or asking.

[joseph]

I actually registered for an account after reading this post (I'd been searching for something unrelated) just so I could respond.

First... Just heartbreaking... I actually cringed when I read this.

As for the rest... I concur with the overall sentiment that this was user error and not a product defect.. but that said, couldn’t a feature request be added to either:

• Prevent setting the cache directory to a non-empty directory. Or..
• Issue a strongly worded popup confirmation if the system detects the cache directory is being changed to a non-empty directory

Understanding that it’s impossible to ever build software that cannot do bad things inadvertently… but warnings can at least reduce the likelihood that someone makes a careless mistake that ends up being so costly.

[Efficient_Good_5784]

• Prevent setting the cache directory to a non-empty directory. Or..
• Issue a strongly worded popup confirmation if the system detects the cache directory is being changed to a non-empty directory

Understanding that it’s impossible to ever build software that cannot do bad things inadvertently… but warnings can at least reduce the likelihood that someone makes a careless mistake that ends up being so costly.

One of the problems here is how Jellyfin is deployed. You can't write a program to do things before it even is deployed. How is it going to run directory checks if the program isn't running?

For example, a lot of people deploy Jellyfin using Docker. How are you going to program Jellyfin to prevent you from host mounting a sensitive directory as the cache directory? Jellyfin will literally see it with the name "cache" and assume it's fine. You can link any directory to Jellyfin using Docker and give each directory different names than what they actually are.

To implement your idea with Docker in this example, you would have to take it up to Docker itself to prevent you from doing so.

Also, the cache directory doesn't have to be empty to be the correct one to link to. Continuing with the Docker example, lets say you delete your Jellyfin container and redeploy a new container. Deleting the old container won't delete external host mounts which means the old cache folder remains. All you have to do now is link this old cache folder to the new Jellyfin container to reuse it. Having a message pop up stating the cache folder has items in it that you might not want to delete would be a false positive in this case. How would this message be handled? Would it block the server from running until it's dismissed? That would mean you'll need to log into Jellyfin's dashboard each time the server restarts to dismiss it. And you can't just do it once for the life of the server. For all the server knows, you might have changed the cache directory to something else while it was offline.

[kagetsu]

Use DMDE to recover the files in the future. As long as you don't overwrite it, it will even recover it with the structure perfectly.

[toytown]

• Prevent setting the cache directory to a non-empty directory. Or..
• Issue a strongly worded popup confirmation if the system detects the cache directory is being changed to a non-empty directory

A quick way of addressing this would just be to prefix any of the cache files with a certain name "jfCache_" or something and then only delete files with that prefix.  Right now i see a file in my cache called "3fcc023749b2f856cbafe428b5f6bc830.ts", so let's just make it "jfCache_3fcc023749b2f856cbafe428b5f6bc830.ts"

[Kevin Nord]

I actually registered for an account after reading this post (I'd been searching for something unrelated) just so I could respond.

First... Just heartbreaking... I actually cringed when I read this.

As for the rest... I concur with the overall sentiment that this was user error and not a product defect.. but that said, couldn’t a feature request be added to either:

• Prevent setting the cache directory to a non-empty directory. Or..
• Issue a strongly worded popup confirmation if the system detects the cache directory is being changed to a non-empty directory

Understanding that it’s impossible to ever build software that cannot do bad things inadvertently… but warnings can at least reduce the likelihood that someone makes a careless mistake that ends up being so costly.

Self-hosted applications generally aren't targeted at lowest common denominator users - it's typically  assumed if you are running your own services you have some idea of how computers, networks  and operating systems work. Personally, I think there are more important lines of effort to be developed than protecting users from doing dumb things.

[HERIGROSIR]

Again, this is a Jellyfin bug, not the user's fault

because the case is the same with me

I even deleted it from the start scheduled job for all ,
so as not to perform automatic deletion

but how many times has jellyfin deleted that alphabet people folder

of course I have a backup of the people folder, and I repopulate it

3 days later the people folder was deleted again
this is the case if metadata is placed in external drive

but if I put the metadata on drive C:
The data is not deleted by itself, but I want the metadata to be put all in external drive

because I don't want as time goes by the actor's photo data continues to increase and burden my computer

therefore I want to put all the metadata in external drive


and jellyfin deleted the people folder without us telling it to, this is clearly a jellyfin bug

[HERIGROSIR]

............