When a rule did the wrong thing
Work down this list. Each entry names the thing to look at, not just the cause.
A cleanup rule deleted more than expected
Look at the delete scope first, not the conditions. The match level and the delete scope are two different controls and they are the commonest mix-up: matching per season with a delete scope of Show removes an entire series because one season qualified. That is working as designed, and it is rarely what someone meant the first time.
Then check, in this order:
- Blast-radius caps, and what they do now. A maximum count and a maximum percentage, both applied, stricter one winning. The percentage never blocks a run of 20 titles or fewer, so it cannot strangle a small library — which also means it will not save you on one. A rule's own cap no longer refuses. It used to queue nothing when a rule went over; it now queues everything, each with its countdown, and bounds how many that rule deletes per pass — the rest wait for the next pass. The trade is deliberate and worth knowing: a runaway rule no longer stops itself dead, it leaks at the cap rate until somebody notices the warning. The cross-rule total (200 by default) works the same way: it caps how many titles all rules together delete in one pass, and the rest stay due for the next pass. No cap refuses a run any more.
- Multi-user protection. It only checks the people you selected. Somebody left off the list holds nothing.
- Watch sources. TV protection per season needs a per-episode source — Plex history if enabled, or Tautulli. Trakt alone only reports series-level, so a household on Trakt only has no per-season protection at all.
A cleanup rule is not acting on something it should
- **Is Dry run only on?** In dry run the rule reports and never acts.
- Is the title excluded? Exclusions beat conditions, always. Check the collapsible Excluded list on the rule.
- **Is it in a protected collection, or carrying a protected arr tag? Either protects it for everyone*, regardless of watch state.
- Is somebody mid-watch? Multi-user protection keeps anything a selected person has started and not finished.
- Is it still within grace, or still counting down? Grace after last activity holds a title for N days after a protected person last watched it; Act after is the wait between matching and deleting. Playing it again restarts grace. Just opening it does not.
The fastest answer is not on this screen: open the title and read its Cleanup protection panel, which states its status right now and the reason.
The Live Preview looks out of date
It is cached, so the timestamp can be a few minutes old. It recomputes on its own when your library or watch data changes. Refresh forces a fresh scan now.
You cannot create a cleanup rule at all
Connect a Sonarr or Radarr instance first.
A collection is empty, or smaller than the preview promised
A builder resolves the whole franchise or list; Plex only gets the part you own. If the preview showed mostly dimmed rows, the collection is doing exactly what it was asked and you simply do not hold those titles yet.
A seasonal collection vanished
Out of season a seasonal collection stops building, and with Remove from Plex when out of season on, its Plex collection is deleted and re-created next season. Your movies and shows are never touched — only the collection object.
A preset you edited went back to normal
It should not, and it does not: a collection that came from a preset keeps an editable source, and re-adding the preset will not overwrite your change. If a collection really did revert, it was rebuilt from a different source — check its builders.