turn off “Enable video preview thumbnails” in your TV and Movies libraries. these can consume enormous amounts of unnecessary data. These are the thumbnails you see while seeking forwards/backward during playback.

If it’s your posters, other artwork that has ballooned in size, you could give Plex Image Cleanup (https://metamanager.wiki/en/latest/home/scripts/image-cleanup.html) a look. Reduced by Plex size by tens of GBs, as I had multiple posters and backgrounds for almost all media.

I’m not certain how it works on your VPS, but I run my Plex server on my raspberry pi - and it got out of control - so just set permissions to 000 on the metadata folder. Now no matter what Plex tries to do - it cannot store metadata on my pi.

There isn’t any noticeable performance hit to it needing to grab metadata online each and every time it’s accessed - LAN or WAN. And any bandwidth usage isn’t really a concern since it’s not going to be anywhere near streaming tv, movies, or music usage.

I know it’s not exactly an answer to your question - but it is an alternative solution. Nobody who uses my server has even noticed that I did this.

So if you have the ability to alter permissions - delete the folders contents and then try just denying access to the folder and see how that affects your server.

I’m not sure you can. Plex is pretty closed up about this stuff.

A quick google tells me you might be able to free up a good bit of space by disabling preview thumbnails if you’re using those. Plex even has a support page about it.