Plex can't delete files in external hdd

Troubleshooting
1

I have installed PLEX using the dietpi-software and I am amazed how smooth the stream/s are.
I am running into one issue that the plex webplayer does not allow me to delete the movies on my external hdd and because my whole lib is on the hdd I have to turn off my whole system and connect the drive to my main pc to get things sorted but it is a very cumbersome process to repeat every alternat day so I tried searching for what could be the issue but I am unable to understand as I am a complete novice in these.
Can anyone help me change the file permissions for plex for the lib on my external hdd?

2

Hi,

welcome to our community. Do you have any error message while trying to delete files/movies from inside Plex? Can you share the content of the folder in question where your movies are located? What file system format you are using on that disk?

ls -la /mnt/path/to/your/files
lsblk -o name,fstype,label,size,ro,type,mountpoint,partuuid,uuid
4

ls -la /media/storage returns with

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1121258862 Jan 16  2021 'Wrong Turn.mkv'

I have multiple files so just pasting one example and all the files ave the same permissions.

and lsblk -o name,fstype,label,size,ro,type,mountpoint,partuuid,uuid returns with

NAME FSTYPE LABEL   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT PARTUUID                             UUID
sda               465.8G  0 disk                                                 
├─sda1
│    vfat           512M  0 part            1aca3062-01                          F1CB-84D8
└─sda2
     vfat         465.3G  0 part /media/sto 1aca3062-02                          23DE-A493
mmcblk0
│                  59.5G  0 disk                                                 
├─mmcblk0p1
│    vfat           128M  0 part /boot      92b3e04f-01                          AE5D-8FB0
└─mmcblk0p2
     ext4          59.3G  0 part /          92b3e04f-02                          a83708ef-afc9-486f-85b2-8e3bad22c439

sda2 is the drive my media is stored.

5

The problem is the file system format of your drive as it is vfat. This is not a Linux file system and hence not supporting UNIX file permissions. Means all files on that drive are owned by user root which prevents changing them for other user.

6

User, group and modes can be hardcoded via mount options (e.g. adding them to /etc/fstab). Here an overview of vfat mount options: Linux Kernel Documentation / filesystems / vfat.rst

But I would indeed consider using a native Linux filesystem, or NTFS which has limited emulated UNIX permissions support, at the cost of additional CPU utilization.