How does JellyFin handle offline media (ie. external usb drive)

[Ken Chng]

I'm in the process of moving from kodi to jellyfin. I have question how JellyFin handle with removal drives or files link to another PC that is not always on all the time. I know on Kodi, you can just tell it is kept it during the scan for new media file. Not sure how Jellyfin handle this situation. I read it auto remove media that is not available which it is not ideal since when the PC is turn on again. JellyFin have to re-scrap the media folder again which takes awhile.

[Dex Luther]

I used to have part of one of my libraries on a spare PC and had the HDD accessable over LAN, and that worked pretty good. Just had to keep the other PC turned on or a big portion of one of my libraries would be unplayable. Having the metadata and images saved in the same folder at least made rescans less of an issue.

Recently got a 5tb external SSD and it's connected through USB. I moved all my content over to it and redid my libraries to point to it. It works really well too. That is assuming you don't have a bunch of users on your server. It would probably struggle a lot with more than one. Could maybe get away with two users if no one's playing 4k content, but I wouldn't really count on that.

You can also look up the model of your external drive and "shucking". A lot of them are pretty much a basic drive inside, which means you can take your external drive and turn it into an internal drive, so that's also an option.

You can also tell Jellyfin to not automatically scan specific libraries, and I think that cuts down on stuff disappearing when the drive is disconnected. The only problem is if you forget and manually trigger a rescan of the library, but like I said saving the metadata and images with the content (It's an option in Library Management I believe).

[Ken Chng]

You will be able to manually select specific library to scan for new content. I disable auto scan on my kodi and i can either so full scan when the PC is turned on or just select the folder for kodi to scan it.