I’ve got my setup in a real mess, now. 
I set up completed download handling and that was working fine - it would rename files and use hard links, so I’d have a renamed file in Sonarr’s directory and the original file would remain seeding in my torrent client, while the use of hard links meant that I wasn’t using unnecessary space. I wanted to grab Breaking Bad season 5 from BTN, though, and Sonarr won’t find that (I assume because on BTN it’s named as season 5.1 and season 5.2).
After some searching around, I decided to manually download the torrent. I thought that completed download handling would also extend to downloads added outside of Sonarr, and I’m still not sure on the answer to this. The download didn’t import to Sonarr after finishing, though, so I decided to enable the drone factory for the downloads folder.
I thought that my settings for copying, not moving, completed downloads and for using hard links would also be used by the drone factory, but it seems not. The matched files have been moved completely to the Sonarr directory (and, annoyingly, the Breaking Bad season didn’t seem to match, but that’s something else I’ll have to work out). This means that all of my seeding torrents are broken and I’ll have to manually copy everything back in (and rename it all!).
Obviously I don’t want this to happen again so my question is in the title. Is this supposed to happen, and, if it is, can I turn it off? I never want to remove files and stop seeding torrents, so the drone factory feature won’t be any use to me unless I can be sure that it’s going to act the same way as the completed download handler (in my case, leave the original file and create a hard link in the Sonarr directory with the new name etc.)
Yes its supposed to happen, no you can’t turn it off. Drone Factory (DF) is not a replacement for Completed Download Handling (CDH), it was replaced by CDH. In comparison DF is stupid, all it does is move files, it has no knowledge that it should copy or hard link files.
I’d like to eventually make manual import have the option to copy or hardlink, but at the moment it will use the download client details (if the release is linked in Sonarr) otherwise it will move it.
Ah, this is what I feared. I knew that DF was older and CDH was supposed to be its replacement in most cases, but I assumed that it’d still follow those settings about hard links and such. In hindsight, obviously, I shouldn’t have made those assumptions.
Could you explain what you mean about manual import? I’m still not sure what to do in this situation - that is, a release is available on my indexer of choice but Sonarr doesn’t pick it up when doing a search. I want to have the torrent in my client and leave it in there, while having a hard-linked version sorted and renamed in my Sonarr folder (and to clarify, by ‘Sonarr folder’ I’m talking about the ‘path’ setting when adding or editing a series).
Manual import was added in the last big release, it lets you pick the folder to import from, then choose which episode(s) each file belongs to, its meant for cases where Sonarr won’t import automatically (title doesn’t match or there is a conflict of episodes), it would also let you import a lower quality episode over a higher quality one if you wanted to (sometimes it happens).
In your situation you can do a few things:
- Link the downloads to Sonarr in some way (renaming in your torrent tracker might work, if thats possible) so Sonarr can understand the release
- Manually import them by copying (or hardlinking) to the sorted series folder
- Copy/Hardlink the files into Drone factory and let Sonarr take care of the renaming (not 100% sure how hardlinking will work in this case, but it should)
I’m confused about how your first paragraph relates to your second one. The manual import feature that you describe sounds like exactly what I want in this situation. The name that Sonarr expects doesn’t match what I want, so manually telling Sonarr which folder to import from (and if needs be, which episode is which) is what I’d ideally want to do.
The methods you describe after that sound like what I would have expected to do, since I didn’t think the manual import feature existed yet. But if it does, that would surely be preferable over one of these more time-consuming methods.
They don’t relate to each other. I was describing what manual import is/does, but not trying to suggest that it would work in your case, at least at this time.
Your options are still as I outlined in the second post.
But what you describe sounds like it would work in my case. Unless I misunderstand? I have only seen a manual import option in the Activity tab Queue section. Is this what you were referring to? Or are you talking about something not yet merged into master?
Thanks for outlining my current options, anyway. I think I can create a temporary drone factory directory and copy them in there.
You can use Manual Import from the wanted page as well (lets you pick a folder), but thats going to have the same effect as Drone Factory, its going to move the files (since picking a folder has no knowledge of the item in the download client).
Ok, thanks. Unfortunately this situation is pretty annoying for me. I’ll have to implement one of the methods that you described above first (a temporary drone factory didn’t work, which in hindsight makes sense since it won’t recognise the names properly) but I may have to create some sort of feature request for this, unless something similar exists already.