So, I might be losing my mind here, because digging through the megathreads, fmhy and Awesome-Jellyfin hasn’t turned up anything like what I’m looking for, but I could swear I read about an *arr tool once before that would watch a download folder for files, and create properly named symlinks to the file in your library folder. Looking around, the closest I’ve found is Fixarr, but that’s definitely not it. I’m super confused. Is my memory just playing tricks on me?
Edit: It was just Radarr and Sonarr I was thinking of. Thank for your help, everyone.
Sounds like you are conflating symlinks with hardlinks. Arrs have an option to do hard links.
That is indeed what I was thinking of.
Isn’t this exactly what radarr, sonarr, lidarr do when set up for hardlinks and atomic moves?
Or do you mean you already have files and want to replace them with hardlinks?
https://trash-guides.info/File-and-Folder-Structure/Replace-copies-with-hardlinks/
- Sonarr for television
- Radarr for movies
- Readarr for ebooks and audiobooks
Documentation in the Servarr Wiki
And Lidarr for music. But the option is hard links, not symlinks.
I am very glad you asked this question! After setting up my arrs, and loving the automation with jellyseer, I can’t figure out how to manually download and create the hard links that sonarr and radar automatically do. I look forward to someone answering your question.
Thanks for this…I feel a bit better. https://lemm.ee/comment/18949188
I guess I should mention that I run Jellyfin and the arrs through my seedbox so I have only the vaguest notion of what docker is and does. But I guess a question I’ve never bothered to ask is does the copy command in a Linux system create a hard link? Because that seems like it would solve my problems too easily.
Copy command duplicates the file, so it takes up twice the space. Creating a hard link is instant and doesn’t waste space
Cool, I don’t feel as dumb now because that’s how I thought it worked. How do I create a hard link instead of copying in Linux though? The space saving is my main goal because space is finite on my box and there’s no reason to have it on there twice.
The reason I ask is because a specific show my wife and I want to watch doesn’t pull correctly in Jellyseer but I’m almost certain I could just manually download the season I need. I just don’t know how to do what the arrs are doing on the backend.
Edit: Gave her a goog and it looks pretty easy actually. If anyone else is interested in how to make hard links in Linux.
Just manually add the torrent to your download client and then assign it to the sonarr category and let it do the rest for you.
Interesting, I have tried that before but I didn’t think it worked, however there’s no telling if I waited long enough for sonarr to actually scan for it and add it. The hard link command worked great for a movie I wanted to manually add but since I can’t hard link directories I will try that for a TV show. Thanks for the advice!
Edit: After figuring out how to add a profile and custom format that wouldn’t allow downloads from the indexers, I added the series that I was already seeding but it only imported the first season (of eight).
I think it is getting thrown off by the folder structure? In the directory that my torrent client seeds from the files are in a folder named “Series S01-08” and then there is a folder for each season inside that folder. I’m guessing it just stops after season 1 thinking it’s done finding episodes in that directory? I’m unsure how to proceed. Any advice is welcome.
Yeah if it’s an entire eight season series in one torrent this probably won’t work as sonarr can’t do more than single episodes or single seasons. In this case, I think you’ll need to create a folder for each season manually in your target directory for your media library, copy the appropriate files to each one, navigate to the series in sonarr, click the “scan” button so it sees the new files, and then click the rename button if you wish.
I think you’ll need to have two copies in this case since sonarr won’t work for handlinks here but you can always delete the seeded copy later after you’ve seeded it for a while.
Edit: also if you try this again with other files in the future, instead of waiting for sonarr/radarr to see the file you manually added to your torrent client, you can hit the refresh button under the activity tab and it should pick it up right away.
The only one I know is Filebot, but it’s not FOSS and it’s paid.
It works great, but for my needs I’ve been just relying on Sonarr’s and Radarr’s Hardlink functionality.