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 think it depends how your current files are organized. The arrs require a certain level of organization and naming to do a library import, they also want you to keep your downloads and your library copy as different folders but in a way that hopefully supports hardlinks so you don't take up twice the space. 'Trash guides' is a great place to look at for getting started and they have an unraid guide as well.
The servarr (radarr, lidarr, readarr), sonarr, and trash guides discords are also really helpful if you don't object to using discord.
If all your current files are still in the "download" folder, you could probably setup the arrs and qbit as recommended in the guides and then work your way through importing them to the arrs from the activity queue.
Yeah, that's the rub... they are all currently in separate movies, shows, and music folders as Plex/Jellyfin want them to be.
But it's sounding like the best bet is to leave the existing content alone for now and spin things up per the guides until I have a better handle on how it all works. Appreciate the input!
If they're organized you can do library imports, after setting up the arrs for the most part. For example your movies folder would need to have a folder per movie named like 'Movie Title (year)' at a minimum and then contain the movie...just make sure what you're seeding in qbit is not the same folder, but you can use hardlinks to keep seeding how qbit wants it while allowing the arrs to keep its copy nice and clean.
I'm pretty sure you can do a library import after you setup the arrs and use them for a while, you just need to utilize categories is qbit so the arrs only look at their specific category.
Read through their wiki getting started and faq and check out the trash guides.