Can two instances refer to the same media folder without issues?

[deslea]

Is it possible for two instances of Jellyfin to refer to the same media source folder without issues?

My use case is this: I have a Jellyfin instance on my home server that has things TV-oriented - movies, tv shows, music videos etc. Let's call this the TV instance. I also have a separate instance for things audio-oriented (music etc). Let's call this the Music instance. 

(The segregation is pretty much just a real-world-usage one - it doesn't help my productivity to see TV shows as an option when I'm looking for background music to work, LOL. I realise there are other ways of structuring this, like having it all in one instance and having user-based limits on what libraries appear, but let's work with what I have for now. I can look at restructuring if needed later).

Is there any reason the Music instance couldn't refer to the same music videos source folder already being used by the TV instance? I realise there is a possibility that one would overwrite the other's NFO changes, so I would envisage one being set to write metadata to the folder and the other not, but is there anything else that could go wrong?

Many thanks for any advice anyone can give.

[Venson]

Well there are some considerations regarding metadata if you use NFO storage but its generally fine if you point two jellyfin instances to the same media folders. What NOT works, is two jellyfin instances working off the same database.

[coffeeknight]

How are you running your instances?
I run them using docker-compose and can add an ro tag to the media volume. This makes it read only and makes it a bit "safer" to use with multiple instances. I have one test container/instance and one "live" container.

If you're using mounts then you can also usually mount it as read only and that will avoid any issues. I disable nfo writes though. No issues I've seen at this point with read-only media mounts.

I do recommend staggering your scan times so that they don't both do a full scan at the same time to avoid an iowait bottleneck.

[deslea]

Thank you both! Good point about ensuring scan times don't overlap, too.