[SOLVED] How do I give Jellyfin permanent access to an external drive?
I didn't like Kodi due to the unpleasant controls, especially on Android, so I decided to try out Jellyfin. It was really easy to get working, and I like it a lot more than Kodi, but I started to have problems after the first time restarting my computer.
I store my media on an external LUKS encrypted hard drive. Because of that, for some reason, Jellyfin's permission to access the drive go away after a reboot. That means something like chgrp -R jellyfin /media/username does work, but it stops working after I restart my computer and unlock the disk.
I tried modifying the /etc/fstab file without really knowing what I was doing, and almost bricked the system. Thank goodness I'm running an atomic distro (Fedora Silverblue), I was able to recover pretty quickly.
How do I give Jellyfin permanent access to my hard drive?
I used GNOME Disks to modify /etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab to auto decrypt and auto mount on boot. Jellyfin still loses its access each time I restart, even though the jellyfin group still displays having access to the files.
Edit: Turns out it does have access, but it's no longer under the /media/username directory. I have to point Jellyfin to /mnt/UUID instead. This fixed it!
What filesystem are you using on the external drive? If it is NTFS or FAT, they won't store permissions on the filesystem, which would explain why the owner/group changes are not persistent. To fix that, you can set the uid/gid on mount in your fstab.
This is what my issue was to — unfortunately, I didn't see this post before removing Jellyfin server. Couldn't find this in the official help docs - so someone might want to add this to the help and quick-start guides.