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Homelab Journal

Homelab Journal #5: Naming files like an adult

Week five of the SmallGrid homelab: organising Jellyfin media folders properly and learning that metadata matching is not magic.

This week’s goal

Make the media library less chaotic.

Not perfect. Just less like someone threw files at a hard drive during a minor panic.

What I actually did

I cleaned up the folder layout:

/mnt/media/movies
/mnt/media/tv
/mnt/media/music

Then I started using predictable names:

Film Name (2024)/Film Name (2024).mkv
Show Name/Season 01/Show Name - S01E01.mkv

Jellyfin rewarded this with fewer weird matches and less sulking during scans.

This was one of those beginner lessons that feels too obvious after you learn it. Before that, you assume the software will simply understand a file called movie_final_real_thisone.mkv.

It will not. Nor should it.

What broke, or nearly did

I found duplicate files, half-renamed folders, and at least one title that looked like it had been named by a sleepy raccoon walking across a keyboard.

The temptation was to fix everything in one giant session. I did a small batch instead, because “just one more folder” is how evenings disappear.

What I’m keeping

• Simple media categories
• Predictable naming
• Smaller cleanup sessions
• A refusal to rename everything at midnight

SmallGrid takeaway

Good file names are boring infrastructure. They make Jellyfin better, backups clearer, and future troubleshooting less like archaeology.