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How do you manage mega torrents? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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When you have some torrent where there is a huge collection of files only some of which you want right now, but maybe you will come back to it later to get something else.

Example: This is a listing for torrents of audiobooks from The Eye. (Alphabetically by author, one torrent per letter.)

So I don't want to download every audiobook ever. I selectively choose which to download. Then the torrent is "completed" when those are done. But I want to keep them around because maybe later I want something else. I just leave them in the queue?

In the torrent apps I've used, they seem to get confused by these. If you move the downloaded file to a proper location in your filesystem, then it is having a "missing files" error, unable to seed, and the torrent is in error state. But if you leave the obtained files, it's still in the "not yet downloaded" directory forever.

Wondering if there is some smart way of managing this, or what?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I just select the files I want from the bigger torrents, and then proceed to not touch it ever again, unless I want to add more stuff to the downloaded files.

I also don't move things around - I'm on Linux so all the torrents live in one place with symlinks pointing to where I need/want the data to be as I figured out yeeeears ago that trying to manage a couple thousand active torrents while having the data spread everywhere is a quick trip to migrane town.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Am also on linux. I have a bigger question about how to manage the downloaded files overall but I decided to start with a more specific post and see how that went. ;)

Previously I would move everything after done and a bit of seeding. Lately I've just been letting it accrue where it lands and seed indefinately. However that's not really viable as I move past VLC as media player. Media management software (kodi, jellyfin etc) has file structure requirements, it wants to write nfo files and so on. Also I don't have infinite HDD space so some stuff I just delete after watching.

Is there some kind of tool you use to manage the symlinks? Or you create them all manually in the cli or gui/cli/tui file manager? What's the workflow?

Another benefit of leaving everything in the torrent client is remembering what I already have without doing a file system search all the time. I do really like that aspect.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

If you're using the *arr apps (Sonarr/Radarr/etc) for managing the sourcing and downloading of your torrents, they natively support using hard-links for "moving" the torrent files to their required location in the media server directory structure. It's a hardlink instead of a symlink as well which also means the copies don't rely on each other. They can each be moved/renamed/deleted without breaking the other file. Trash guides is a really helpful guide for setting up the *arr apps properly which includes a section on hard-links. https://trash-guides.info/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I don't use *arrs. A few years ago they were way more than I needed and quite complex to get going. I get the impression they are more mature now. Maybe is time to check out again.

I will look through the website you suggest. At first glance I am at odds with the author as I'm not at all "picky". But probably something to glean about how to work things out anyway.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Radarr and Sonarr both have features to sym/hardlink files to new places after the download client tells them it's finished.

Filebot also gets mentioned a lot for this task, though I haven't used it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Looks like others have provided MOST of the answers.

Radarr/sonarr do the heavy lifting making symlinks where symlinks are required, but there's still the occasional bit of manual downloading.

I also have a script that'll check for broken symlinks like once a week and notify me of them and I'll go through and clean them up occasionally, but that's not super common and only happens if I'm manually removing content I made manual symlinks for, since I'll just let radarr/sonarr deal with it otherwise.

(The full stack is jellyseerr -> radarr/sonarr -> qbittorrent/sabnzb -> links for jellyfin)