I haven’t been able to find any instructions on how to set this up properly. I have Sonarr set up with multiple shows, all going to different directories on different external hard drives. However, i recently noticed that Sonarr isn’t seeding from those locations—it’s downloading everything to a central Sonarr downloads dir and seeding from there, and copying duplicates to the correct download location. How do I prevent this? I seed everything forever and don’t want any temporary download directories—everything should download right to the location the Plex scans.
I don’t see how any of this is relevant to my issue—hardlinks aren’t an option as my directories are across many different volumes. All I want is to make sure the seed directory matches the download directory for every episode.
For example, let’s say I have two shows in Sonarr, “Last Month Tonight” and “House of the Doggo”:
C:
----Downloads_Sonarr
T:
----tv_hd
--------Last Month Tonight
------------Season 11
----tv_dv5
--------[other shows]
V:
----tv_hd
--------[other shows]
----tv_dv5
--------House of the Doggo
------------Season 1
------------Season 2
I just want the files to download to the correct directories and seed from there. Right now everything seeds from “Downloads_Sonarr” (these directory structures aren’t exact obviously but given to show how my library is organized. Plex scans all “tv_*” folders into one library.
The relevance is that the guide shows how it is designed, intended and possible for seeding to occur without copies. Use hardlinks, don’t get duplicates/copies. Do it without hardlinks, you will get duplicates/copies.
What you want is not possible.
That sort of seems insane to me? Like clearly Sonarr is setting the download path when it adds a torrent to the client (Qbittorent in my case). Sonarr also knows the final path of file. Was this an intentional choice by the developers to specifically prohibit this use case?
Not insane. Just logic and rules.
It wasn’t a choice. And it’s not a Sonarr specific or exclusive thing.
It’s how the various components of the whole ecosystem work together (but also how they also work separately), in addition to how file systems work etc. As explained in the guide I linked. Once you understand that, you’ll understand why hardlinks are the only way.
I think you might be misunderstanding what I need here—this has nothing to do with filesystems, at the end of the day all Sonarr is doing is adding torrents to Qbittorrent, and it’s setting a save path—I just want it to set the save path to the path Sonarr already knows to copy the completed download to.
I read through every page of that “guide” (even the pages for platforms I don’t use just to be safe) and it isn’t describing the same use case as I’m talking about here.
There is a misunderstanding, but it’s not mine.
TL;DR You cannot do it how you want.
I guess my question is, why is this use case specifically restricted? Are there tools that allow for updating the save paths automatically? I’m also getting a real sense of hostility here—like I’m using the software “wrong” but I have no idea why this is considered bad.
Downloading directly to the series folder is not supported, it’s not supported for several reasons.
- It would require support for setting paths per download for every download client Sonarr supports
- It wouldn’t work with XEM mappings
- Release names are often not named well to match with media center applications (Plex, Kodi, etc)
- Archived releases, which would affect both torrents and usenet
- Upgrades would remove files and break seeding
The correct setup in Sonarr to to set your system up for hardlinks and atomic moves as recommended by fanboy in his first response. If you’d like to ignore that and have downloads go directly to the series folder this would be something you’d need to implement yourself, likely with a Custom Script on grab.
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