REALLY dumb question (I've never tried it)

[mark19721964 13]

What happens if you disconnect a drive and then reconnect it? Does everything return to normal by just reconnecting the drive? The reason I ask as I have a one of several drives connected to Emby. I need to temporarily disconnect that drive and I'm wondering if it will mess up folders/playlists or does everything go back to normal once the drive is reconnected (nothing would be changed on the drive itself)?

Thanks

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

2 minutes ago, mark19721964 said:

What happens if you disconnect a drive and then reconnect it? Does everything return to normal by just reconnecting the drive? The reason I ask as I have a one of several drives connected to Emby. I need to temporarily disconnect that drive and I'm wondering if it will mess up folders/playlists or does everything go back to normal once the drive is reconnected (nothing would be changed on the drive itself)?

Thanks

I seem to remember that there used to be a problem with that in that if the removed drive gets scanned all the media on it gets removed from Emby. I believe that it is now a little easier to move things around but I would recommend that you disable scans when you remove the drive and be sure that it gets the same drive letter when it is reconnected. I have moved drives many times and have never had any problem BUT I store all metadata and images with the media so nothing ever gets truly lost. 

BTW: I use Stablebit's DrivePool now so moving and adding drives is much less of a problem. Of course, to make that work easily I have gone to virtually all external drives so adding a drive is just a matter of plugging it into an unused USB port and, after Windows recognizes it, adding it to the pool.

[darkassassin07 652]

The way emby handles this is by looking for the existence of the folder(s) you've added to your libraries configuration. If, during a library scan, the folder exists but it's empty, Emby will assume the media inside was deleted and remove it from your library. If the folder does not exist, Emby will preserve the library and simply display the 'no compatible streams' error when trying to play an item from the missing folder. When the folder re-appears, media becomes accessible again and all picks up as it was.

 

On a Windows system, when disconnecting a drive Emby should keep the library preserved as described, and pick up as usual when the drive returns (as long as it keeps the same drive letter).

Edited September 26, 2025 by darkassassin07

[mark19721964 13]

Thanks. I've noticed before (say I have a TV series on Emby) and I've created a playlist with certain of my favorite episodes. I'm watching that series and see something wrong with a few episodes so I fix them, replace them in the TV show folder they were. In doing that, the playlist that I've created with 'sometimes" not always, completely delete those episodes I replaced and I have to put them back... 

[Luke 42077]

On 9/26/2025 at 9:31 PM, mark19721964 said:

Thanks. I've noticed before (say I have a TV series on Emby) and I've created a playlist with certain of my favorite episodes. I'm watching that series and see something wrong with a few episodes so I fix them, replace them in the TV show folder they were. In doing that, the playlist that I've created with 'sometimes" not always, completely delete those episodes I replaced and I have to put them back... 

HI, what if instead, you simply replace the episode files rather than deleting first?

[mark19721964 13]

7 hours ago, Luke said:

HI, what if instead, you simply replace the episode files rather than deleting first?

I see what you mean. I've actually done that before. Dragged the replacement named "exactly the same" to the drive and windows says "it exists, do you want to replace it"  I say yes. But most of the time (for whatever dumb reason) I don't do that. I think because if I already have the file that it's replacing and I don't feel like looking for the file being replaced to see if it has the same file extension. Example, if it's an MP4 and I'm replacing it with MKV, it will keep the MP4 if I do it that way... I think that's why I usually don't end up doing that. But... if that prevents deletion from a playlist when you replace an episode, I'll keep that in mind next time I do it.

[brothom 177]

@Lukecorrect me if I'm wrong.

@mark19721964 I've been testing with this as well and found these cases:

Say you have a tv-show library with this path:
"C:\Media\Crime Shows\"

You have this show
"C:\Media\Crime Shows\Breaking Bad (2008)\"

If you remove the show folder "C:\Media\Crime Shows\Breaking Bad (2008)\", the entire show will be deleted from Emby.

But if you remove "C:\Media\Crime Shows\", all entries within the library stay the same. Nothing gets deleted.

This seems to be due to an underwater error "Cannot find part of path" so Emby can't scan the (now deleted) directory and all entries stay the same.

I'm actually pretty glad Emby does this, because one time I forgot to remount my drive and Emby kept all the entries and all media items just gave the "No compatible stream available"-message indicating "something" was wrong.
 

[Luke 42077]

8 hours ago, brothom said:

@Lukecorrect me if I'm wrong.

@mark19721964 I've been testing with this as well and found these cases:

Say you have a tv-show library with this path:
"C:\Media\Crime Shows\"

You have this show
"C:\Media\Crime Shows\Breaking Bad (2008)\"

If you remove the show folder "C:\Media\Crime Shows\Breaking Bad (2008)\", the entire show will be deleted from Emby.

But if you remove "C:\Media\Crime Shows\", all entries within the library stay the same. Nothing gets deleted.

This seems to be due to an underwater error "Cannot find part of path" so Emby can't scan the (now deleted) directory and all entries stay the same.

I'm actually pretty glad Emby does this, because one time I forgot to remount my drive and Emby kept all the entries and all media items just gave the "No compatible stream available"-message indicating "something" was wrong.
 

That’s the idea yes, so that if the library goes offline it won’t be wiped out of your server database.

[Luke 42077]

And then if you want to remove it, you remove it from library setup.

[mark19721964 13]

15 hours ago, brothom said:

@Lukecorrect me if I'm wrong.

@mark19721964 I've been testing with this as well and found these cases:

Say you have a tv-show library with this path:
"C:\Media\Crime Shows\"

You have this show
"C:\Media\Crime Shows\Breaking Bad (2008)\"

If you remove the show folder "C:\Media\Crime Shows\Breaking Bad (2008)\", the entire show will be deleted from Emby.

But if you remove "C:\Media\Crime Shows\", all entries within the library stay the same. Nothing gets deleted.

This seems to be due to an underwater error "Cannot find part of path" so Emby can't scan the (now deleted) directory and all entries stay the same.

I'm actually pretty glad Emby does this, because one time I forgot to remount my drive and Emby kept all the entries and all media items just gave the "No compatible stream available"-message indicating "something" was wrong.
 

It sounds like you're saying this: If you have a TV show folder with all of your folders of tv shows located within the TV show folder, that if you delete individual shows within that folder they get deleted, but if you delete the entire TV Show folder nothing gets deleted? Am I understanding that correctly?

[Luke 42077]

9 minutes ago, mark19721964 said:

It sounds like you're saying this: If you have a TV show folder with all of your folders of tv shows located within the TV show folder, that if you delete individual shows within that folder they get deleted, but if you delete the entire TV Show folder nothing gets deleted? Am I understanding that correctly?

Correct. You need to also remove it from Emby if that's what you want to do.

Why is this? Suppose that drive were a network drive or external drive. You wouldn't want your Emby Server database to wipe out it's content every time you unplug the drive.

[mark19721964 13]

5 hours ago, Luke said:

Correct. You need to also remove it from Emby if that's what you want to do.

Why is this? Suppose that drive were a network drive or external drive. You wouldn't want your Emby Server database to wipe out it's content every time you unplug the drive.

And for whatever reason if you DO want the entire TV show library deleted, you would just do it from the Emby dashboard/libraries and delete the entire library there I guess. That makes total sense, if a drive accidentally gets disconnected or something. I honestly had no clue that was the case

[pgriffith 88]

I have my Emby libraries spread over multiple machines, so my Movies library contains content from more than one path. If one of the machines is off, all Emby does is refuse to play anything that is temporarily "offline" until that machine come back online.

[brothom 177]

2 hours ago, mark19721964 said:

And for whatever reason if you DO want the entire TV show library deleted, you would just do it from the Emby dashboard/libraries and delete the entire library there I guess. That makes total sense, if a drive accidentally gets disconnected or something. I honestly had no clue that was the case

Yep, you got it! The same goes for all root folders within a library so if one becomes disconnected, corrupted or is unreachable due to a network error, all is still well.

The "downside" is that when someone forcible removes a root folder, Emby doesn't know if that's caused by one of the previous errors, so the folder remains in Emby.

If your library is made up of multiple root folders (like in my case I use different drives), you would need to remove just that root folder from that library.