My situation for example:
I had Sickbeard running and I was deployed without any real access to my server while I was gone. As we know Sickbeard doesn’t attempt new files when there are failures, and a lot of files weren’t up to the cutoff, and some were missing completely from my series. When I came home, I found Sickbeard development rather dead, and made the switch to Sonarr after looking at both Sonarr and Sickrage.
If I do an ‘Add and search for missing,’ many times I’ll have a few missing, with several there, but not at cutoff in my shows. It will then search for the missing episodes as it should.
This method is that, as expected, episodes will be searched for separately. Those episodes will then often be at the cutoff, leaving those that were downloaded but not at cutoff. This leaves them below the quality of the ones that were just searched for when you performed the ‘Add and search for missing’ from Import Series. Yes, you can then do automatic season or automatic/manual episode searches to get the rest of the episodes upgraded with single episode torrents/Usenet posts.
The problem with this is that searching for full season packs, (Blu-ray most often seen) are skipped as a possible upgrade solution. I know some people don’t like season packs, but I still find decent completion with my Usenet/Torrent provider setup for season packs and I’m having to do a lot of backfill. This gives one (or more than one) extra opportunities to get all files to the series cutoff (or above if you don’t have your cutoff also at the top of the priority list.) then if you skipped to trying to find single files through Usenet/torrents.
Many trackers remove single episodes after a season is over, and put up a season pack, but even trackers that don’t remove single episodes see seeds on single episodes dwindle anyway as people move to seed the season packs.
In the case of Usenet, sometimes I can find a season pack that will complete, in situations where some of the matching single episode uploads won’t.
Using ‘Add and search for missing’ then sometimes leaves some episodes at lower qualities than what could have actually have been obtained, because in some cases some of the single episode torrents and usenet single episodes are seedless/uncompleteable.
There are two workarounds:
Use ‘Add and search for missing’ and then possibly be forced to manually check all your indexers/trackers for season packs. In the case of torrents, you can choose to download only those episodes that you are still missing at your max chosen quality (or cutoff.) In the case of Usenet, you’re required to download a lot of additional data for episodes in season packs that have already been downloaded in the proper quality.
Or easier; You can simply click ‘Add’ for each series, and then go to the series, and then ‘Search for all episodes in this series.’ This avoids having to manually search for torrent/Usenet season packs during my example condition, but adds a lot of clicking as I’m importing almost 1,000 shows to Sonarr, as compared to having an ‘Add and search for all episodes not at cutoff.’
I chose the second option. I doubt I’ll be the only person in this situation. Surely, as Sickbeard lies dormant, and will eventually break there will be a mass exodus, and many will come to find Sonarr as their new home. Personally I bet you get many converts from Sickrage as well, as they seem to commit and push a lot of buggy code to their user base and with Jackett there isn’t too much Sickrage has feature-wise that Sonarr can’t compete with and I see many pluses with Sonarr that you don’t get with Sickrage.
Simply put, there may be a lot of people in the near-future that could be saved a lot of work with the added ‘Add and search for all not at cutoff’ button to the import series page.
