Menu: Check

• CHECk - (Option 3): Check Both Databases to Determine Current Status and Repairs/Optimizations Needed, If Any

  • Overview: Diagnoses the health of the main and blobs databases without modifying anything. A check covers several independent conditions:

    • Structural damage — SQLite-level integrity failures or missing schema objects (tables/indexes/triggers DBRepair can later recreate)
    • Abandoned recovery tables — tables left behind by an earlier SQLite .recover attempt made outside DBRepair. Check reports how many it found and marks the database damaged. DBRepair cleans up these residual structures and then repairs the database(s) (see Repair).
    • Search index damage — the FTS (Full-Text Search) indexes can become corrupted even when the database otherwise passes a basic integrity check, which can surface as "database disk image is malformed" errors when adding items to collections, updating metadata, or text searches fail. If this is reported, use Repair (see Repair) or Automatic (see Automatic); both rebuild the search indexes and repopulate them.
    • Fragmentation — the ratio of free (unused) pages to total pages in the file; over roughly 3% is flagged as fragmented.
    • Bloat — an accumulation of orphaned statistics_bandwidth rows in the main database (see Deflate). PMS databases perform the best under 3% fragmentation.
    • Unrecoverable damage — SQLite internal data tables are unreadable. This is the one condition Repair cannot fix; DBRepair will tell you to use Replace instead.
    • Orphaned media items — Orphans is automatically invoked during Check and shows its results there as well (see Orphans).

  • Availability: Runs only when Plex Media Server is stopped.

  • Safety status: Safe — read-only.

  • Sample Output:

    • Healthy:

      Enter command # -or- command name (4 char min) : check
      
      Checking the PMS databases...
        Main  DB is OK.
        Blobs DB is OK.
      
      Checking the PMS databases complete.
      

    • Damage found (structural):

      Enter command # -or- command name (4 char min) : check
      
      Checking the PMS databases...
        Main Database is damaged: Tree 99 page 183436 cell 57: Rowid 398757 out of order
        Main  DB is damaged.
        Blobs DB is OK.
      
        Main database requires repair. Run 'repair' (option 5) to rebuild.
      
      Checking the PMS databases complete.
      

    • Damage found (ghost entries):

      Enter command # -or- command name (4 char min) : check
      
      Checking the PMS databases...
        Main  DB is damaged.
          Found 12 ghost entries, 0 NULL title rows.  Repair required
        Blobs DB is OK.
      
        Main database requires repair. Run 'repair' (option 5) to rebuild.
      
      Checking the PMS databases complete.
      

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