So if the drive is set to sleep when not active, it would potentially cause this issue?
Yes.
The DVR server should run 24x7.
All my spinning rust drives run 24x7, except my laptop drives which power off when I shut down my laptop, and I don't run the servers on the laptop.
Just to be clear, the Channels server is run off of the internal SSD of my Mac, while the data drive which contains my video library is stored on a spinning external drive. In this case, should I still disable sleep on the external drive?
Thanks for your help… 
Definitely.
Ok, I changed it to never sleep. We’ll see what kind of affect that has. Thanks again for your help.
You should not need to disable sleep on the external drive.
@chDVRuser is correct. This error means the volume called Backup was not properly mounted on your computer.
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If this is the case, then how was Channels able to reimport my entire library using the exact same mounted drive and file path that supposedly didn’t exist? None of my other backup utilities or other programs which use this same drive and file path have ever had a single issue. Something just doesn’t add up…
The uuid keeps changing on the drive when it’s mounted and unmounted. Channels sees it as a new drive with new data every time it changes. It’s not a channels problem, it’s a you problem.
Install one of the many automount apps for Mac. It will help.
Just to be clear, this is a usb-c connected drive. How do I make sure that the uuid doesn’t change?
Keep the Drive awake.
Make sure it has an external power source
It’s bus powered…
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Make it not bus powered
What do you mean by "reimport"? The DVR does not remove imports when a drive is not available — it will only remove them if the DVR is instructed to purge missing files by the user (or if the import settings on the DVR are changed to no longer have that imported directory).
You would have to submit diagnostics from the DVR for me to have any better idea of what's going on.
On macOS, drives are generally mounted in the same location (under /Volumes) when they are remounted. I'm not sure what UUID you are referring to.
This should not be necessary.
This should not be necessary for a Mac.
Eric, you’re a genius and because of your comments I think I now know what’s going on. I have a webhook that runs the Channels prune command in the background every few minutes. After a reboot, Channels is looking for the designated drive and if it hasn’t yet mounted and the prune command runs, Channels sees all of my files as missing and deletes the references to them.
Is my thinking correct?
Yes, if you are issuing the command to prune your imports, the DVR will do exactly as you requested and remove all of your imports that are not currently available.
This is the reason why we don't automatically prune imports and why we don't recommend people setup something to automatically do it.
Lesson learned . Thank you so much as I never would have figured it out. Have a blessed weekend…
Funny I posted about this..... I always check for existence of all folders before pruning.
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Good to hear you got it working.
Guess you missed my question earlier...