I don't know much about these specific services but this is the kind of behavior I'd expect to see if you've got a data synchronization service running and the clocks are out of sync. Like if it thinks an action was taken in the future that was actually in the past. Might be useful to check time zone configs and any other synchronization-related items.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Hi everyone, I have Truenas core running on an old desktop at home. For the past year everything has been going great. However for the past month or so I started to notice that my SMB share for Jellyfin was getting reset to some 6 movies. All of my home videos, music, TV shows, and other movies where gone. I have a backup drive where I store all this data so I copied the files back and Jellyfin saw them immediately again... but by the next day all where gone again. At first I thought someone had deleted them by accident so I checked the user access of my family members and no one except me has access to delete movies and the logs don't show any media deletion that I wasn't aware of (I found 2 duplicated movies). The server isn't exposed in any way to the internet except for a VPN connection that I keep closed tabs regarding access. I checked the permissions of Jellyfin's container in my Truenas server and both UID and GID are set to 568 per the Internet's recommendation when I set it up originally. My server is running on two 4TB HDDs configured in a mirror. I checked the health of both drives and both show healthy and without errors. I still suspect that when the server syncs the data, that somehow the data from the wrong drive is overwriting the data of the one with the media and deleting it, but I don't know enough on how to check.
Please let me know if you need more information and how to get it, as I am a complete noob when it comes to servers but I am trying to learn.
Thanks y'all
UPDATE: Some have suggested that my Syncthings server could have been the issue, however turning off the server has not fixed the issue and once again files got deleted.
UPDATE 2: I looked at the SMB logs and noticed a bunch of "Unlink" events that seem to be running every morning around 7am and go over every one of my media files. I am assuming "Unlink" means delete somehow, but I can't determine what is calling it.
UPDATE 3: It was Jellyfin deleting the media. I just caught it red-handed.
UPDATE 4: Final update. After deleting my installation and SMB share from my Truenas and reinstalling everything, the deletion issue is now apparently gone. As an extra precaution when installing Jellyfin, I made sure to check the "Read Only" for it's access to the SMB share to make sure it cannot delete any media even if it REALLY wants to.
Interesting, I wonder if my Syncthing server could be the culprit. They are on different pools but I'll turn it off and see if it does anything.
UPDATE: Files still got deleted :(
Oh, Syncthing? It could definitely do this, I've had it happen.
Once files are deleted, ST will have the deletion in it's database. You can recreate the files all you want, ST is going to delete them.
The thing was I have never deleted them, one day they just started getting deleted by themselves and nothing I do gets them to stay in the drives.
You sure that's what is happening, and it's not just mounting a different snapshot/dataset being mounted "on top" ?
I've seen it happen, which is why I ask. Assume the root dataset is named pool0 and has set0 set1 and set1/set2 as child datasets.
Their mount points are as follows:
/pool0/set0
/pool0/set1
/pool0/set1/set2
Now, if somehow, say set2 gets unmounted.temporarily, and you save files to /pool0/set1/set2 while the data set is not mounted, it'll actually put those files in the set1 dataset, under the set2 directory.
But, when you mount the pool0/set1/set2 dataset again, the files under the set1 dataset are hidden by the set2 child.
Am I explaining it well enough for you to follow along?
Make sure you don't have some similar situation by temporarily unmounting any nested datasets and ls'ing their mount points.
Ok, I'll take a look at this and report back if I spot something.
UPDATE: So I checked on this, but I don't have a pool per se, I will say my drive configuration is as Mirror with sda and sdb drives seemingly side by side.
zfs list shows datasets.
zpool list shows pools.
mirror is a type of pool.
Is the SMB share set read-only?
This is a strange one.
Don't think so, but how can I make sure? Looking at the ACL rules I see that @owner (me), @group, and user (me) are all set to full control. However I also see two '@everyone' in the list, one set to modify and the second set to custom (screenshot attached) .
I am also attaching a screenshot of my main datasets screen here as I see that my Dataset Space Management is set to a total allocation of 1.16TB and I am not sure if this is the issue
EDIT: The Jellyfin SMB is still labeled plex media as it used to be Plex before I switched.
What's in the logs?
I don't see anything in the logs that I can gather, but how can I make sure I'm looking at the right log so I can copy it here?
I'd say you should check if any scheduled cleaning tasks are accidentally deleting your files.
Tripwire and auditd can monitor a filesystem and notify you about changes. I don't know the tools myself, because i never needed them. Maybe these can give you a hint on the responsible service.
If you suspect a certain service to be responsible: what do the logs of the service say? If nothing: increase the loglevel to info or debug?
Sorry. No solution. Just ideas. Good luck.