I've been kind of piece-mealing my way towards cleaning up my media server, and could use a little advice on the next steps.
Currently I have a little under 10TB of torrented media that I have been downloading to / seeding from media library folders that Plex and Jellyfin monitor, using my desktop PC as the torrenting client. This requires a bit of manual maintenance--i.e., manually selecting the destination folder for the torrents in a way that Plex/Jellyfin can see.
I recently fired up qBittorrent on my media server (Unraid if that matters), and would like to try out some of the *arrs, but I'm not quite sure how to proceed without creating some kind of unholy mess.
I guess option A is just to import all of my current torrented content from desktop to media server client, and keep manually specifying the torrent destination. It's not a huge deal, since I am typically only adding a few torrents per week, so it's literal seconds or minutes of work to find the content I want.
Option B is to start "clean" and follow one of the many how-tos for starting up an *arr stack. But never having used the software, I don't have a good sense for how it works, and whether there are any pitfalls to watch out for when trying to spin it up with an existing media library that includes both torrented and ripped content.
From a bit of reading, I think radarr for example will only care about new content. So I should be able to migrate all my existing torrents to the new client on my media server, including their existing locations amongst my media library, and then just let radarr locate and manage new content. Is that correct?
Any other advice or suggestions I should be considering?
I just switched from using Medusa and CouchPotato to Sonarr and Radarr. During the library import process, you can specify if the application should "monitor" the media which is what it means to download new content or try and replace with higher qualities. You can import entire libraries as "Unmonitored" so it will show it, but effectively ignore it unless you go back and change it. You can also just not import your library, and start "clean" if you wanted, and I believe it will just ignore the files for anything you don't add.
Thanks, this is helpful!
If I do a "clean" install, can i later identify specific pieces of media within a library to monitor?
Yes you can. You select what it is at import.
I'd also suggest not setting up your torrent client (or not enabling it) u til you've finished your import, and setting what you are monitoring and what you are not.
This way you can just import, and enable/disable monitoring of items easily before you start any new downloads.
Got it, thanks!