The only way I can see switching my Luddite family off of the streaming sites is by making it easier. Up until now, I’ve torrented the old fashioned way, but now I’m moving into plex (ik, ik, jellyfin is better) and want to start using the -arrs. As I understand it, which I’m not sure I do, the -arrs will automatically grab torrents. In my mind, this would eat up a TB pretty quickly. Do you guys all have massive SSDs (heh), or am I misunderstanding?
As I understand it, which I’m not sure I do, the -arrs will automatically grab torrents. In my mind, this would eat up a TB pretty quickly.
You seem to be partly misunderstanding. They only grab what you tell them to, so they won’t automatically fill your disks with random videos.
What they do is grab any movies or TV series that you specify, and give you the option to upgrade them to a file size and quality limit that you set. For example, you could tell them that movies can be a maximum of 10GB per file, and TV can be a maximum of 3GB, and that you’d prefer 4k.
There are profile options that let you grab any available copy of a video, and upgrade it as better versions come along.
I really need to just hook them up and play with the settings, but are there options to auto delete, or should I just do some manual maintenance? We don’t typically rewatch movies, for example.
Plex can be set to auto delete. You can set it to delete after something has been watched (after a delay if you want), or to keep a pre-set number of items (e.g. only keep the five latest episodes of show X) or a combination.
Just make sure you set up the *arrs to not re-download the thing that Plex auto deletes.
I’m a hoarder so I keep a lot, but anything that’s time-sensitive like current affairs shows, I delete after watch and set to only keep the latest three episodes.
To be honest, I’m not sure if there’s a way to auto delete, I’ve only ever done it manually. I think Plex can be set up for it, but I’m not sure.
There are plenty of ways this could technically be achieved, but the arrs are not where you would be looking IMO for content deletion (that’s automated).
Though there is a option in the arrs that sets the content to “unmonitored” once it’s deleted on disk. This way the content is not regrabbed once deleted.
Think of the arrs as your downloaders, Plex/Jellyfin/Kodi as your viewers.
If you are using something like unraid for your OS you can set a script that deletes files older then a certain date, or if you use truenas you can do the same. This all really depends where you host/store your files.
And Plex does have the ability to delete content once watched, though I don’t use it as I have multiple users that watch my content, so I have no good way to classify what watched means, as well as there is content that I don’t want deleted as it’s not available online anymore.
As long as you set it up correctly ( unlike myself) and go through your media to make sure you don’t accidentally have duplicates (like I do) it shouldn’t take up much space. The actual -arrs themselves don’t use hardly any space.
Your question is a little odd, Torrenting “manually” and torrenting with the -arrs is the same in “process” and you will use the same amount of diskspace (not accounting for the programs themselves that is).
Using the -arrs is what make the who torrenting process a little more “automated” as you specify the content you are looking for, and once that content it available the software pulls it from whatever sites or index’s you have provided in your initial setup of the programs.
No more having to look at multiple sites for something, as soon as it’s online the arrr pull it and download it as soon as possible for you.
Just depends on what resolution and quality you decide to download. If you stick with 1080p H265, most movies are bout 1.5GB. If you want something better like 4K HDR, you’ll be looking at like 20-30GB per movie I think. I would advise the former, it’s easier on your hard drive and your home internet.
I ran mine off of a portable 2 TB HDD for a long time. Finally upgraded when I built a proper computer and put a 4 TB internal HDD in there.
I would prune the library every couple weeks as stuff got added. Tautulli (3rd party Plex monitor) provided info on what’s been watched and when, so I could delete stuff.
Now I have a 14 TB HDD with a dedicated computer for Plex. I have plans on upgrading everything to a proper RAID5 array with better processing.
When data hoarding disk space is just a construct maaaaaan
Massive SSDs? Nah, just a couple of 1TB drives as cache. The rest of my 120TB is spinning disks :)
Interesting. Are you pre-caching contents on the faster drives? How are you going about it?
I use Unraid as my server OS. It has a mechanism for caching file writes to the slower array disks.
Docker containers running the -arrs and Plex live on the SSDs so they load faster. Downloads are cached to SSDs so that read/write speed isn’t a limit when lots of downloads are running simultaneously. The downloads then get moved to a spinning disk array for long term storage whenever Unraid runs it’s ‘mover’ operation.
I have a simple shell script that runs every night at 4am. It sets a size limit, then it deletes one episode at a time (starting with the oldest) until the directory size is under the limit. So a first in first out system. Scheduled it 3 years ago, and i just never run out of space ever.
you dont have to configure them to grab and upgrade stuff automatically but it does make it better. They do seem to be more focused around data hoarding rather than download/watch/delete but you can definitely use it both ways. There is a button in *arr to delete from list and from disk
A 2tb sata ssd goes for like 65 coins nowadays…pick AV1 & HEVC and you won’t be able to watch that amount in a year…so you can seed for a year too! :)
I have a dedicated box with multiple raid5 spinners, I have had no complaints.
It’s all highly configurable and usage heavily depends on the quality profiles you choose. If you go for 4K content it ramps up pretty quickly, 720p not so much.
