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?
You can add radarr, etc. to your existing stack without changing much. You mount your movies directory to /mnt/movies in the radarr container, shows to /mnt/tv in sonarr, and so on. And the qbittorrent downloads folder to /mnt/downloads. Then, when you add a new movie to radarr, it'll add it to qbittorrent and get downloaded to the downloads folder, and when it's done, radarr will move it from there to the movies folder. Then jellyfin sees the new file and adds it.
If you want to do everything the "radarr way", you'll also want to import the existing library to radarr so that it can identify the movie quality. There are buttons in radarr, etc. to rename and move files the way radarr wants them. Since nothing else cares about this, I let radarr handle the naming. During first setup there was a lot of re-downloading of media it couldn't identify the quality of, but I didn't care about that so I let it happen. But all of this is optional, you can disable quality upgrades and leave your existing library alone.
Thank you, this clears up some misconception i had about how the *arrs work!