Out of disk space, what to do?

Help & Support
1

Ok. Problem scenario:
D: is full.

Happily ever after dream solution:

  1. Add another drive, E:
  2. Add E: in Sonarr
  3. Sonarr creates a “mirrored” folder structure in E:, and continues to import files there.

i.e:

  1. d:\Series-X\Season1\ep1 -> ep10
  2. disk d: gets full
  3. e:\Series-X\Season1\ep11 -> …

That is, Sonarr is “smart” enough to spread files for one single show across multiple drives.

Is this possible?
If not, what to do? I have considered all other solutions I can think of, but everyone has at least some sort of “drawback”.

2

Sonarr will only use one location for series. The easiest solution is using drive pooling software, such as Drive Bender, Drive pool or FlexRAID (there may be others as well), alternatively you will need to balance things manually.

3

Drive bender actually seems useful, thank you.

4

Can you not use symlinks?
In my setup (Ubuntu) I have one “master” directory called TV which point to a fairly large disk.
I have also a few other “TV” directories on other disks, internal and external, which I move series to from time to time when the master drive gets too full. Those series are symlinked back to the master TV directory.
Sonarr has no problem with this, it doesn’t know where the physical directory is and Plex is as happy as Sonarr.

// T

5

I have a problem that could be solved by a solution for the OP.

A little background on my setup:
In my case, Sonarr is in a FreeNAS plugin / jail (container - kinda like a VM). So is Plex. They both see /media folders. It’s the same folder which is actually a ZFS RAID volume from the FreeNAS server.

My Problem:
My very large data volume is nearly at capacity.

My Solution:
Created a new ZFS RAID volume after adding drives. Capacity expansion for an existing ZFS volume is done by replacing drives one by one with larger drives and until they are all replaced no increase is perceived. My volume is 10 drives. Better/cheaper option is to create a new volume. I wanted to leave all existing media/shows in place and create a new place for new media/shows. Done. /media2 is now also seen by Sonarr and Plex. In Plex, I added library /media2 and Plex seamlessly aggregates all shows from /media and /media2. All non-ended or continuing series in Sonarr have been edit to go to /media2 instead of /media.

The Problem My Solution Created:
Now Sonarr is not aware of existing shows in /media for the series that have been edited to rename and place in /media2. Hopefully it doesn’t try to download them again.

My Wish:
I wish there was a way for me to tell Sonarr that some shows for a series are in /media and other shows for that same series are in /media2.

6

If they are still monitored and Sonarr sees them as missing it will, otherwise it only will if the monitored status is changed or you tell it to via a search.

We have no plans to support multiple paths for a single series.

7

Symlink the shows from media2 back to media1, show by show. Don’t let sonarr know that there is a secondary drive.

8

I am aware of all the solutions. Symlinks, raids, LVM, ZFS, etc etc etc. I have been running solutions like this since the 90’s :stuck_out_tongue:, ZFS since more or less it’s initial release…
The problem is, I want to keep it as simple as possible.

Storage pools, zfs, software as Drive Bender, and so on, all introduce an extra layer of complexibility.

My current setup is actually a Storage Pool, but the reason for my initial question is that I dont want to add any more drives to my current storage pool.
Why you ask? Well, if one drive dies, then all my media will be lost.
Sure, do RAID/parity you say, well then there’s an extra cost of additional drives…

The “poor mans solution” is what I asked for, keep all the drives separate and then let Sonarr write to multiple dirs.
If one drive dies, then all I loose is what’s on that drive…
Of course, this offloads the “problem” to Sonarr :stuck_out_tongue:

Possible solution:
I will still have to try Drive Bender, since it says that it can incluede already existing drives, and that it wont touch the NTFS file system on each drive. Every drive will still be readable as a single NTFS drive.

If that’s true, then fine. I can just do a logical “Merge” of the drives, and then get what I want.
But… still some questions… Will it always place all files written in serial, on the same drive? If not, then I still have a problem since shows/seasons might be spread amongst several drives, and if one drive dies, all of my shows will then become incomplete :stuck_out_tongue:

9

What storage pool software are you using where you would lose all your data if one drive dies?

I use StableBit DrivePool, and it doesn’t screw with the file system at all. You can even still access all of the drives individually should you need to. All it does is pool the drives so you only see one folder structure. I’m pretty sure that’s how they all work. Even software RAID like SnapRAID doesn’t touch the filesystem.

As far as your last question concerning individual TV shows being split over several drives, DrivePool lets you create rules to avoid that problem. For example, only allow folder X to exist on drive Y. I would imagine the other solutions have similar features.

10

i use

d:\Series-X\Season1\

e:\Series-Y\Season1\

f:\Series-Z\Season1\

and so on when i add a new series i add it on a drive that have the space to suport that series

11

Thanks for getting back about multiple paths per series Markus101. Thanks for the tip Tommy_Einarsson. I’ll either use symlinks or simply stop monitoring previously downloaded episodes of series that span multiple volumes.

12

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