What are the conditions under which Jellyfin will delete a TV Show folder?

[Archontes]

I have experienced an issue wherein several of my TV series folders have been deleted.

The only plausible explanation that I have is to attribute it to an interaction I had through the android TV client; I used the client to delete a series, and when it didn't apparently delete relatively quickly, I repeated the instruction a couple times, and it seems that the instruction was carried out for each time I issued the instruction, but on a TV series folder at random.

Does anyone have any thoughts on that?

[tmsrxzar]

??? jellyfin nor jellyfin android tv have the capability to delete anything, what is it you actually did?

[Archontes]

https://www.reddit.com/r/jellyfin/commen...ete_media/

You can configure a user to be able to delete media. For the record, I *do* want the ability to delete media. But I can assure the forum that I didn't issue a specific request to delete media that has been deleted, so I suspect I'm hunting down a bug.

[tmsrxzar]

my mistake i went back and looked and it is apparently possible i have just never enabled it (and actually have the mounts in docker "ro")

recommend managing files from any number of available administration tools and techniques external to jellyfin

[Archontes]

So your recommendation is, "Stop wanting that feature to work correctly"?

Thanks.

Does anyone else find the behavior of deleting multiple different folders as a result of iterated requests for a single folder deletion plausible?

[Efficient_Good_5784]

Jellyfin should only delete everything under what you deleted.

As in (for TV shows at least):

• Delete an episode --> single episode deleted
  
• Delete a season folder --> season and all episodes in it deleted
  
• Delete a show --> all seasons and episodes in show is deleted
  

What you're describing with having your tv shows/series disappear at random doesn't seem possible to me. With my experience with software coding, one of the people that wrote the code to delete things in Jellyfin would have had to purposely written code that selects series at random for that effect to happen when you spam the delete button. Or at the very least, the developer would have had to link the delete function to a function that random selects a show when you delete a non-existing show.

I would look elsewhere for this. Do you have other services running that have access to your media folders and can modify/delete media? Any Jellyfin plugins that do the same?

Finally, it's up to you how you run your server. Like tmsrxzar pointed out, many people like to make their media folders read only for Jellyfin so that their media server doesn't mess with their files. You gain security among those files at the expense of functionality. I even remember reading threads in the past about people debating on the delete option within Jellyfin being needed. Jellyfin's main goal isn't to become a file manager for your media, but to serve it to you with metadata and some level of organization.

I personally have all metadata saved along with my media files, so I can't set them to read only, but I would if that wasn't the case. You can also avoid this issue by keeping a backup of your files that you don't want to lose (and enable snapshots if your file system supports that).

[TheDreadPirate]

There are some edge cases. Did you change the jellyfin cache or transcode path? If you co-located your library with your cache or transcode directory, the clean up jobs for both will recursively delete everything in the path.

[Archontes]

Efficient_Good_5784: I can imagine implementations that would not intentionally delete a folder at random. Say if you had an array of paths and the command simply got the item from that index number multiple times. As the command is repeated, the item in that array index changes as the array changes.

I have no other services that have access to that media folder. I did have to reinstall the jellyfin server docker container in order to update it as a consequence of TrueNAS Scale issuing a breaking update. I noticed the folders had been deleted when spinning up the fresh replacement install of jellyfin server. I don't suspect that installing it caused the issue, but I suppose it's possible. Edit: I should note that at the time of issuing multiple commands I noticed that three folders had ultimately been deleted. On the later day reinstalling I noticed a few more folders on top of that.

TheDreadPirate: I think I *did* change my jellyfin cache path, but it's adjacent to the media folder, e.g. /mnt/NAS/cache, /mnt/NAS/media.

Tomorrow I'll set up a test media library and attempt to replicate the issue.

Another thing that is suggestive to me is that one never receives a message or indication that a folder targeted for deletion has already been deleted or cannot be found.

[frayedwire]

I'm new here and this thread is a few months old, but this exact thing happened to me and confounded me tonight.

In chromecast with google tv I clicked delete on an episode of a show I had finished watching. It seemed to not work (nothing happened and delete was still highlighted) so I clicked delete again. It deleted the entire show folder including all other episodes from the directory AND deleted at least one other entire show folder and all episodes for a different show as well.

I haven't determined if it deleted more than just those two because there may be some I'm forgetting, but they're gone from the universe and not in recycle bin or anything (this is the MO of all Jellyfin deletes so not surprising).

Anyway I'm not well versed in this stuff, but figured I'd add my similar anecdote to the pile.