I have a series in my downloads (seeding torrents) which was not automatically picked up by Sonarr. I wanted to import it using the ‘Import Existing Series On Disk’ feature.
It didn’t recognise the series in the folder, so I modified the search to tell it what the series was. After adding, it then successfully found all episodes.
The issue is, I have Sonarr set up (and rely on it) to organise my shows into its folder, using hard links rather than copying. This way, Plex picks up the shows. But when using this import option, it just left the files where they were and didn’t create any hardlinks. So it’s not in the folder with the rest of my series and not picked up by Plex.
Does the import existing series feature not work with the moving/hardlinking and renaming features of Sonarr? If not, it’s useless to me unfortunately.
Import existing series is meant to be used on already sorted files, not files you want moved somewhere else, Adding a new series or importing an existing one tells Sonarr where you want the files stored.
You can use Manual Import to Move (not copy or hardlink) unsorted files, just point it at the appropriate folder (once you correct the location where you want Sonarr to move the files to) or you can configure you download client to label those releases with the same label that Sonarr is set to use and it should pick them up automatically.
I’m beginning to understand the limitations of the way I’m trying to user Sonarr (which I feel doesn’t quite match the way it’s designed).
In this case, the files are unsorted and I want to have a sorted copy in the same directory as all of my other sorted files but it’s important that this ‘copy’ is actually a hard link to the original, otherwise I’d run out of space in no time at all.
This means that the Manual Import option isn’t the right one, because then I get two copies of the files (can’t delete/move the originals, so I’d have to create a copy before doing Manual Import).
I’m wondering if it would be possible to accomplish what I want with just a single directory for files (where they are accessed by the torrent client). I can turn off the renamer and hope that Plex matches everything using the original names, which I think seems likely. But can I still have Sonarr tracking which episodes I have, without Sonarr having its own directory for them?
I’m not exactly sure of the impact of turning off Completed Download Handling. I see two possibilities:
Sonarr continues to download episodes by passing them to the torrent client, but once they are done the episode counts do not get updated, so the result is that Sonarr can’t track which episodes I have and which are missing.
Sonarr continues to download episodes and track which are present and which are missing, meaning it acts in the same way that it currently does, only without creating hard links for files anywhere.
Does that sound feasible? Sorry for the long post, I’ve tried to shorten it but it all seems so complicated
It will be #1, Sonarr won’t track anything unless it in imported.
You could let Sonarr sort the files then use a Custom Script to hardlink the file back to another location, but if Sonarr upgrades a release (proper or better quality) you’ll need to manually clean up the hardlinked file or you will have two files.
