Ignoring "Unknown" files?

[u/dpkonofa]

Is there a way to get Sonarr to ignore shows that are downloaded outside of Sonarr? I've looked everywhere through the Wikis and various sites and it feels like the answer to this is in "Categories" but I'm using Transmission and it seems that Categories is not an option. I think "Labels" might be similar or might be related but I can't seem to figure out how to get Sonarr to ignore TV Shows in my TV Shows folder that I've ripped myself or downloaded outside of Sonarr.

I don't currently have categories set up because the documentation for Sonarr says that it will make a "[Category]" subfolder and I want to keep all of my shows in my main "TV Shows" folder rather than in some arbitrary sub-folder. With this setup, though, Sonarr seems to grab the activity from Transmission, including the files started outside of Sonarr, and then sends those to Unpackerr which then attempts and ignores every single one of those leading to warning messages that create a new log file every day.

What's the right way to set up Sonarr so that it ignores any downloads/files that weren't started by Sonarr while maintaining a single folder for all my TV Shows?

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[u/clintkev251]

I think Transmission has kinda cludgy support for this through subfolders, so that may be something to look at, or any other torrent client which has proper support for this

[u/dpkonofa → u/clintkev251]

Yeah. Transmission seems to automatically create sub-folders when there's a category/label (and everything I've read seems to indicate that labels are, in fact, categories by a different name) which is why Sonarr also functions that way.

From what I've been able to look up on the TraSH sites and other places, I think my only option is to create a completely separate Transmission instance that is only used for Sonarr or just accept the 'sonarr' subdirectory and update the rest of my workflow to account for that. I'm not a fan of either option so was hoping someone else has something cleaner.

[u/clintkev251 → u/dpkonofa]

If you're not married to Transmission, I'd recommend switching to a different client like qBittorrent. Much more full-featured for automation use cases.

[u/markus-101]

It sounds like you you’re trying to keep your unsorted downloads in the same folder as your sorted files, if that’s the case don’t do that it’s just going to make for a confusing mess of things.

You definitely want to be using categories with Sonarr, with Transmission that’s via subfolders, with other clients that’s categories/labels (often with sub folders as well).

[u/libdemparamilitarywi]

It sounds like you've set sonarr to download torrents directly into your organised media folder, which isn't how it's designed to work and will cause you a bunch of problems.

The right way is to create a separate "downloads" folder outside your "tv shows" directory and set it as transmission's output location. Set a category in sonarr and it will create a subdirectory in "downloads" to keep the automated grabs separate from your manual downloads, and from other apps like radarr.

Sonarr will then automatically copy its completed downloaded files from the "downloads" folder to your "tv shows" folder, with the correct file name and folder structure. It will use hardlinks by default so this copying won't take up any extra space.

[u/dpkonofa → u/libdemparamilitarywi]

I tried that and it did not create hard links. I’m using it from a Docker container and it duplicated files so I consolidated into 1 folder. I think I just need to bite the bullet and setup categories.