Daniel McKnight
e981784c48
Documents recent process of repairing a Plex database to resolve Docker image upgrade failures Reviewed-on: #10 Co-authored-by: Daniel McKnight <daniel@mcknight.tech> Co-committed-by: Daniel McKnight <daniel@mcknight.tech>
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40 lines
No EOL
2.5 KiB
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---
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date: 2025-01-15
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title: Plex Database Repair
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tags:
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- homelab
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- plex
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- troubleshooting
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---
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About a year ago, my Plex container stopped working after updating to a newer image. I was able to work around the issue
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by pinning the container version to the last working image prior to the breaking update. Over the course of this past
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year, I've occasionally spent some time reading through forum posts, trying to upgrade to different newer versions, and
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doing my best to glean something useful from the generic database errors that I could find in the container logs. This
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week I changed up my search terms and found a solution.
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## The Problem
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Somehow, I ended up in a state where I had a working Plex instance, but upgrading the container to a newer image would
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fail. Either the server would fail to start outright, or it would start with all of my libraries showing up empty.
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Rolling back to the older image always gave me a working instance, so it was never a particularly high priority for me
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to diagnose and fix the issue (tbh, I was hoping Jellyfin would address music transcoding with Android Auto and I could
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finally just migrate to that). Eventually, I figured out that the issue was coming from a database operation as part of
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a migration that happens during container init.
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## The Solution
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Once I realized this was a database issue, I was able to find
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[this Plex support article](https://support.plex.tv/articles/repair-a-corrupted-database/) that discusses repairing a
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database. I ended up rebuilding the database using the process towards the end of that article, and then I was able to
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pull the latest Docker image which started right up (after running that database migration). As far as I can tell, all
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of my libraries, watch history, playlists, etc. are still there.
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## Closing Thoughts
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I have no idea what happened to cause my database to become corrupted, but I believe it is the same database I started
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with when I was running Plex on Windows, over 10 years ago. I do wish Plex had friendlier tools for database
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import/export and migration; the documented process of just copying the application data isn't particularly friendly for
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capturing backups and I have no idea how to work with that to efficiently scale out a Plex container for high
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availability.
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In any case, I have Plex back up and running without any major issues 🎉. I still plan on moving to Jellyfin, but
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it doesn't currently let me play my music library in my car (Android Auto only does direct playback), so I'm sticking
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with Plex for the time being. |