I’m considering the change from SickBeard to Sonarr mostly for design and up-to-dateness reasons. SickRage is also an alternative I’m considering, but only if Sonarr doesn’t fit my needs. I’ve used SB for over two years now, with little to no complaints other than it being hardly kept up-to-date recently and that the design is a little old (especially compared to CouchPotato for example that now looks stunning). I’m also using torrents only (I know the advantages of usenet though), and the lack of built-in support in the main SB branch is a disadvantage.
I’m still not sure that I understand the way Sonarr works however. From what I could gather from the FAQ and various posts, it would work like this : as long as it’s on, Sonarr fetches the RSS from the torrent providers I’ve chosen and checks if any of my wanted episodes are in there. Therefore, am I right to assume that if I were to install Sonarr on my PC (I don’t have a NAS (at least for now)), all RSS feeds published while my PC is off wouldn’t be noticed and the episodes therefore not downloaded?
I understand that SB continuously searches for all wanted episodes and how that is unnecessarily resource-consuming. Does Sonarr search missing episodes that are wanted since the last boot or would I have to search them manually? This is especially crucial for me because, living in Europe, most episodes find their way onto torrent sites in the early morning.
So in more general terms : is Sonarr meant only for a system that stays on 24/7 (a NAS for example) or can it be used on a regular PC?
If I recall the devs have mentioned that Sonarr will attempt to go further back via the RSS feeds if it has been shut off for a while, but even if someone explained the specifics of that, it’s going to depend on the indexers you’re using and how long things stay on their feeds.
Sickbeard doesn’t search continually for episodes (well, the official version doesn’t, at least, I can’t speak for SickRage or other forks), it mainly uses the same RSS feed technique. However, it doesn’t have the feature I mentioned above. Instead it would perform a backlog search for missing episodes every few weeks (possibly, also if it has been shut off for ‘a while’?), which would be the equivalent of you doing a manual search in Sonarr. The Sonarr philosophy is that if it has been watching the RSS feeds, then that search isn’t going to yield anything new, so there’s no point in it.
Basically, I’d say that if SB was working with your on/off schedule, Sonarr will probably be just fine, too.
Sonarr will attempt to page the RSS feed to the last time it successfully synced, as long as that time isn’t too long and the pages Sonarr is able to load go back as far as the last sync there won’t be an issue. If Sonarr was unable to sync for a long time, say a week, then it would have a gap of RSS items that it can’t fill.
Sonarr won’t search for an episode if its not found in RSS automatically, but you can always kick off a manual search for episodes if it happens to miss one.
Regarding SB, because of the lacking torrents support, I’ve been using a fork which has added some providers, like KAT, using their search API. However, it does search only the RSS! As I’ve said, I’ve hardly ever had issues so therefore it should work for Sonarr.
I think I’ll just try it out for a few weeks and see how I like (and maybe buy myself a more durable NAS solution - my external HDDs are filling quickly).
Just two questions :
Can I kick off a manual search for all missing episodes or do I have to target a specific show/season/episode?
Does Sonarr “know” when it hasn’t been able to catch up on the previously loaded feed?
Can I kick off a manual search for all missing episodes or do I have to target a specific show/season/episode?
Yes, on the Wanted: Missing page there is an option, beware that it will use a large number of API requests and might take a long time to finish, especially if you have limited API calls or your indexer tells Sonarr to limit its API calls.
Does Sonarr “know” when it hasn’t been able to catch up on the previously loaded feed?
Offhand I’m not sure if it tracks it anywhere beyond a log message, but it does log a Warning (pretty sure its a Warning), when it can’t catch up.
Thanks. I was asking the second one with the vague idea that maybe one could hook-up that warning with a search, but if it’s indeed separate API calls each time, that would be a rather harsh workload (supposing the provider failing to catch up happens often with my PC usage schedule).
One important note, Sonarr will not be able to catch up if the indexer doesn’t support multiple pages on the rss.
A week is too long, if Sonarr is off more than 24h then it won’t be able to fill the gaps.
But a warning will be logged if that happens, iirc it even tells you the time period of the gap and which indexer.
PS: KAT supports paging and will go back 30 pages (750 releases total) or 24h, whichever comes first.
