Your library
Clean up your library
Lifecycle rules flag titles nobody is watching, show everyone what is leaving soon, and, only if you allow it, free the disk space after a grace period.
Libraries fill up. Lifecycle rules find the titles nobody is watching any more, list them for you with how much space they would free, and tell the household what is about to go so anyone can save it. Removing files is a separate choice: by default lifecycle only reports, and nothing is ever deleted until you turn removal on and a grace period has passed.
Turn it on for a library#
Open Admin, then Libraries, pick a library and switch on Enable lifecycle rules. Each library picks one preset:
| Preset | Flags a title when |
|---|---|
| Never watched | Nobody has watched it, and it has been in the library longer than the age window |
| Not watched recently | Nobody has watched it within the age window |
| Watched and idle | Someone watched it, and nobody has touched it since, for longer than the age window |
| Requested and never watched | It came in through a request and the people who asked for it never watched it |
The same panel sets:
- Age window: how many days count as "a long time" for the preset (7 to 3650).
- Action: Report only (the default) or Remove after grace period.
- Grace period: how long a flagged title waits before it can be removed (1 to 365 days, 14 by default).
- Leaving soon window: only show a title in Leaving soon once its removal is this close. Leave it empty to show everything flagged.
- Disk pressure floor: optional. Only act when the library's disk has less than this much free space.
Evaluation runs on its own about once a day, at a quiet moment (it waits while people are watching). You can also run it right away from Admin, then Lifecycle.
Custom rules#
When the presets are not enough, add your own under Admin, then Lifecycle, then Rules. A rule is one or more groups of conditions, joined with AND or OR, for example "4K, larger than 60 GB, nobody watched it in a year, and the disk is under 500 GB free". Conditions include:
- When it was added, released, or last watched, and how many profiles watched it
- Whether it was requested, how long ago the request was fulfilled, and whether the people who requested it watched it
- How many people have it on their watchlist
- Size on disk, resolution, bitrate, video codec, audio languages, runtime
- Genres, studios, collections, critics and audience ratings
- Free space on the library's disk
A rule can target whole titles or single seasons of a show, and has its own action and grace period. Use Test to check a rule against one title before you turn it on. Each library can have up to 16 rules.
What is never removed#
These protections always win, whatever a rule says:
- Anything on someone's watchlist. This is how viewers save a title.
- Anything an admin chose to keep.
- Anything someone is partway through, or that is playing right now.
- Anything with an active request, for example a title someone asked for again.
Every protection is checked again right before a removal, so a title saved at the last minute is still safe.
See what is leaving#
As the admin, Admin, then Lifecycle lists every flagged title with the rule that flagged it, why it matched, who requested it, how much space it frees and when it becomes eligible for removal. From there you can:
- Keep a title, which exempts it from lifecycle for good. You can also keep many titles at once from Browse by selecting them.
- Postpone a title to push its removal back, with an optional note.
- Remove titles now, after a confirmation, instead of waiting for the grace period.
Everyone else can see what is leaving too. In the web and desktop apps, turn on the Leaving soon row on Home. It lists flagged titles from the libraries you can access, so adding one to your watchlist keeps it around. The row is not in the TV apps yet.
To hear about it outside the app, the lifecycle events (leaving soon, removed, kept, postponed, and failed removals) can post to your notification channels under Admin, then Notifications.
Allowing removal#
Removal needs two switches, so one mistake cannot empty a library:
- Under Admin, then Settings, in Library lifecycle, turn on Allow lifecycle removals. A per-library cap limits how many titles one scheduled run can remove.
- Set the library's action, or the rule's, to remove after the grace period.
Titles that your automation tools manage are removed through those tools, so the tool does not add them back, and never just unlinked behind the tool's back. If you would rather keep the files and only stop the tool from adding a title again, turn on Allow gentle unmonitoring in the same settings card and give the rule the Unmonitor, keep files action.
Turning on removal for a library starts a fresh grace period for everything it has flagged, so nothing flagged while you were only reporting disappears straight away. Changing a rule's grace period restarts the countdown for the titles it flags.
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