Re index main library after restore

[gabriel-cloud]

Hi,

I'm looking for a bit of advice. I'm running immich inside an lxc with regular backups. Library is on a different storage mount point and not part of the pxc backup. Library is also using a custom template /year/month/

If I do a restore, I only really want to restore the immich data to that point in time and not the photos library.

Timeline

• day1 backup lxc
• day2 backup lxc
• day3 backup lxc
• day4 hdd failure. Restore needed from day3
• restored immich from day3 backup, but some additional images and videos that were took on day4 are now orphaned as they are present on disk but not in immich.

How can we re index the main library? I know I can trigger it on external libraries, so wondering if the same is possible on this scenarios. Or if this is not the right workflow, please advise how it should be done please. Thanks

[bo0tzz]

There is no way to do this; you should have paired backups of the database and library.

[gabriel-cloud]

Wouldn't that lead to loss of media? I feel like I'm missing something. Anyone ever restoring immich would like to keep their media intact.

[bo0tzz]

How would having backups lead to loss of media?

[gabriel-cloud]

If you keep both in sync, won't you lose anything that was captured and uploaded to immich in between the last backup and the failure? Granted one can increase the backup frequency so the loss is minimal.
I think what I was looking for was the old "repair" tab in the admin panel which would have solved my issue. Extract the orphaned one to a folder.

[skatsubo]

From the opening post and the discussion above, it seems you would like to handle the following case:

• failure of the database and subsequent restore from DB backup
• at the same time, media directory is intact / not affected by the failure, so there is no need to restore from backup
• there are assets uploaded since the last DB backup: upon restoring the database those assets do not appear in Immich timeline (main/native/internal library)

Is that a correct description?

There is no reindexing for the main library. And no "repair" page.

I think this is currently handled outside Immich, smth like that:

• get known assets in the main library with a DB query like docker exec immich_postgres psql -U postgres -d immich -At -c 'select "originalPath" from asset where not "isExternal" order by 1' and "diff" with the list of files on disk
• or find newer assets on disk by timestamp (newer than last DB backup)

Then re-upload them or add as ext lib.

[amorphobia]

Exactly my situation. I'm going to add them as ext lib. However, I wish there'll be an official "repair" in the future.

[brofids]

I'm currently have the same situation, immich DB get corrupted, but the actual media file storage is intact.
upon restoring the DB from backup, I found missing media in timeline when the actual file is exists in the immich media folder.

also hoping there will be option to re-index internal media folder in the future