When you add a serie it has the default monitored on state. However it will not start downloading old episodes automatic, only new will be downloaded. So old episodes are not really monitored. Shouldn’t the state of episodes that already aired be set to un-monitored by default?
They are monitored. For example if episodes are reposted on usenet, or a season is released in Bluray later on, sonarr will pick those up for downloading.
It’s just that sonarr will not perform a backlog search for you when adding a show, which may not always be desirable. That is something you have to manually do.
Setting to unmonitored by default would only make sense for “time sensitive” shows to me, like daily shows or something like the news or whatever, where “old” episodes lose their value very fast.
There’s a trello card that would help for these kinds of scenarios when implemented: https://trello.com/c/R5NQbCml
At the moment you can only choose from which season onwards you want sonarr to monitor for new episodes. The card proposes to add a more granular “monitor future episodes only” option that would be something you want I think 
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Thanks for explaining monitored in more detail. Does this also work for torrents (current develop)? Because I’ve a serie with SDTV quality wich is monitored. In manual search it gives a HDTV-720p version with the right file-size but it’s not downloaded automaticly. The serie is set to HD-all and the SDTV episode was already on my harddrive and not download with Sonarr.
The Trello card seems like a good evolution of the monitored state. You’ve got my vote on that!
It works for torrents too, yes, if you have enabled the RSS sync option for that torrent indexer. Sonarr will regularly check the RSS feed for all indexers for which the option is enabled, and if a new release is available on the RSS that matches your show, quality profile etc, it will grab it.
Once again, only for new items in the RSS feed. When you do a manual search, sonarr is asking the indexer for all releases (also in the past), as if you would open the webpage of the indexer and perform a search there.
So there are 2 possibilities.
Easiest: check if there is a red exclamation mark next to the quality, in the manual search results. If yes, hover over it, and sonarr will tell you why it was not grabbed for downloading.
If there is no red checkmark, it means that release would be grabbed, if it was new in the RSS. I’m guessing maybe the HDTV version was posted a while ago. So sonarr did not see it since it’s only looking at recent RSS items during the regular RSS sync.
The easiest way for backfilling old seasons/episodes is to click the Automatic Search button on either season or episode level. sonarr will do the same as a manual search, and determine the best match automatically.
Manual search should be your fallback option, when the automatic search is not working and you are sure there should be results. Then you can look at the red exclamation marks and see why the releases were rejected. Or maybe you want to select a specific release yourself and overrule sonarr. Maybe the file size of that release is too small as per the profile settings in sonarr, but you are okay with it. In that case you can still click the download button in the search results and force sonarr to grab it.
Edit: I realised you are talking about torrents. So the factor of number of seeds/peers may also be into play. I am not 100% sure what the decision rules are for that, but I think torrents with no seeders are not grabbed. This may be incorrect.
Thanks for the complete reply. This reinstates my first post and feature request: a old episode is not monitored but Sonarr says it does. There is no feedback on what this ‘monitored’ state is for new and old episodes.
B.t.w. my problem was the old episodes not downloading automaticly with torrents. But thats a feature I have learned now 
I hope the Trello monitored ticket will be implemented soon, please vote! https://trello.com/c/R5NQbCml/780-add-series-options-instead-of-selecting-starting-season
Monitored does not mean actively searching (via API searches), it means it will grab them if it comes across them in RSS feeds (reposted), this is a fairly common question, so its in our FAQ: https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/wiki/FAQ#how-does-sonarr-find-episodes. If monitored meant searching then we’d need another term for future wanted episodes.
What feedback do you expect to see?
Adding then searching is also on Trello: https://trello.com/c/h4QDPQZP/600-adding-a-new-show-should-have-an-add-search-backlog-button
I guess it’s a very common question because it’s confusing.
If you combine ‘starting season’, ‘monitored’ and ‘add & search’ in one new setting. My suggestion would be a Search-setting:
Search:
- Search future only
- Search all
- Search missing
No, its mostly because of different terminology vs other applications, which use “Wanted”. The main confusion comes from the lack of granularity when adding a series (why are old episodes being downloaded).
They’re not going to be combined. Monitored is still going to be the term when something is wanted, searching would be a worse term since it implies its searching for something actively (if you compare it to the functions named automatic and manual search), making it much more confusing.
Good example of why I think this would be confusing. “Why would I want to search for an episode that hasn’t aired yet?”
Sonarr still won’t run automatic backlog searches (it will still monitor RSS feeds though), it will only run the search after the series has been added and it determines what is missing (monitored + no file for that episode).
I agree on the ‘search’-name, that was a bad idea.
After thinking a bit longer on the problem I still think there is room for improvement. My suggestions
-
Monitor: I now think Monitor is the right term
but it should be explained throughout the site. A info balloon with “Sonarr periodically looks for the monitored episodes in the last 100 available releases from your configured indexers” would help a lot. - Season pass: a info balloon after monitored status text
- Start season: while adding a show it just says start season. That is for the monitored state, but that isn’t explained on that page. If you call it monitored on the other pages you should call it monitored here to. My suggestion: “Monitor from:”.
- Search for all episodes: search for new downloads in the indexers or on disk? I didn’t know what it did untill I tryed it. Search does not imply downloading. Shouldn’t it just be Download all episodes?
As a new user trying to migrate to Sonarr from Sickbeard, I find the labeling to be extremely confusing. Esp. since it does not seem to do as described. For example, I’m importing series from disk of shows I already have and there is an option as I add the series called “Monitor.” If I choose “None” for the Monitor option and add the series, go to the series and edit it, it still shows the series as “Monitored - Yes.” This is not what I want for some series and the options are confusing, as I would expect when importing the series if I choose “Monitor - None” that the show would be unmonitored.