Collections

[hanaquacks]

I have my entire JF folder backed up nightly and a couple months ago I had a NVME drive die and when I restored from my backups everything seemed fine. Flash forward until now and I'm only just realizing that while everything else got restored, my collections are there, but they're empty. I've made a lot of changes since noticing and don't want to restore wholesale, but was wondering if there was a folder in particular I should be making sure gets restored that will include the content of my collections.

[TheDreadPirate]

What I suspect happened is that when you restored and started Jellyfin you did not have your media in place. There is a job that runs when Jellyfin starts that cleans up playlists and collections of media that is no longer present. So if you restored Jellyfin before restoring your media to their original locations, or correcting permissions, Jellyfin would have emptied your collections.

This job can be turned off. Dashboard > Scheduled Tasks > Clean up collections and playlists. Open that job and remove the trigger.

If you have backups of the collection XMLs, you could try restoring those.

For docker
/config/data/collections

For Linux
/var/lib/jellyfin/data/collections

For Windows
C:\ProgramData\Jellyfin\Server\data\collections (I think this is right)

[hanaquacks]

Thank you! That should be all I need. And thanks for the info on the restore, I think that did happen because maybe I didn't have the drives remounted, I only updated the fstab.

[hanaquacks]

Hey DreadPirate, hopefully a quick followup. I restored the files, they are in there. However, it seems like Jellyfin hasn't gotten the memo. I've tried restarting jellyfin.service, I've tried a library scan, I tried refresh metadata on the collection, replace all metadata, find missing metadata. I simply overwrote the files, maybe I should have deleted the files, done a scan and then added them back in. Can you advise on bringing back this data?

[TheDreadPirate]

Did you reset the permissions on the collection files and folders?

[hanaquacks]

Correct, they are owned by jellyfin, rwxr-x-r-x, I tried changing permissions further, but no change on the server.

[TheDreadPirate]

Do you have ANY collections in the new Jellyfin instance? Or a collection library? I did some testing and Jellyfin would not read in any of my test collections unless there was a collection "library". Which only happened once I manually created one collection. Then I put the collection folders and XMLs in place and "scanned all libraries" and Jellyfin created the collections from those XMLs.

[hanaquacks]

I mean, I've got the "shells" of my old collections in the new instance. And I do have a Collection Library. I restored to a folder outside of jellyfin and then copied the XMLs into each existing Collection folder i.e. copied James Bond XML to the corresponding James Bond folder within collections. Maybe it'd be worth it to delete the Collection Library outright and then re-add it in.

[TheDreadPirate]

Maybe. Are your file paths exactly the same as what is in the XML files?

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Can you share your full jellyfin logs? Jellyfin logged warning and error messages for the couple of movies that existed in my first test instance that didn't exist in my second test instance.

[hanaquacks]

Hopefully I can post a drive link, the text file was too large for upload.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-pT04jv...sp=sharing