Hardlink/Symlink from transmission to Plex and still be able to seed and use filebot

micim987

Cadet
Joined
Mar 23, 2019
Messages
6
Hi, I want to be able to Hardlink/Symlink from my transmission folder to my Plex folder so my media doesn't take up double the space considering what limited space I am working with. I want to be able to use FileBot to organize my media and I would be managing everything through windows although I do have SSH set up. The plex media folder is in its own dataset while the transmission data set is in my personal folder. Both are mounted to /media in the jails.

If I try to use FileBot's built in Symlink I get an error about missing a required privilege. If I elevate filebot it can't see my network drives. If I try to do a hard link I get an error saying that an unexpected network error occurred. What can I do to access my media without using the extra disk space.
 

nojohnny101

Wizard
Joined
Dec 3, 2015
Messages
1,478
I faced this issue where I was duplicating storage between jails but after much though and redesign, it is much better to have two jails just mount to the same place outside of the jail. This is a much more robust design for data storage and allows as many jails as you want to access "shared storage".

Long story short, I would rethink how your data is structured and the mount points of your jails.
 

micim987

Cadet
Joined
Mar 23, 2019
Messages
6
I faced this issue where I was duplicating storage between jails but after much though and redesign, it is much better to have two jails just mount to the same place outside of the jail. This is a much more robust design for data storage and allows as many jails as you want to access "shared storage".

Long story short, I would rethink how your data is structured and the mount points of your jails.
The Issue I have with this is once I restructure the TV shows and Movies for use with plex (Source here) I wont be able to seed through transmission. I personally feel that its unfair to torrent a bunch of media with out seeding back at least 2x what you downloaded.
 

nojohnny101

Wizard
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Dec 3, 2015
Messages
1,478
Why do you have to restructure? You should try and just dumping all tv shows into one directory and all movies into another directory and scan it. You'll be surprised at how good the Plex scanner can separate out seasons and shows in particular.
 

micim987

Cadet
Joined
Mar 23, 2019
Messages
6
Why do you have to restructure? You should try and just dumping all tv shows into one directory and all movies into another directory and scan it. You'll be surprised at how good the Plex scanner can separate out seasons and shows in particular.
I've tried that and it mostly works for movies but its a complete nightmare with TV shows, expecailly ones that are numbered in order and have more than 100 episodes. In my experience once Plex sees that 101 in the title all hell breaks loose because the scanner sees that 101 as Season 1 episode 1.
Also if the TV shows are in a different order you get the wrong titles with the wrong shows and combined episodes also break things.
 

nojohnny101

Wizard
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Dec 3, 2015
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Hmmm, well sounds like your source files are being poorly named by whomever is creating the torrent. I do not have personal experience with more than 100 episodes but season and episode order thing have been very reliably. Most of the big names, from what I have seen, name their tors appropriately.

If what your describing is the case, then you're right there is not much solution beyond a complicated hardlink being created and when I looked into it, it was going to be way more effort than I wanted to put forward. So I ended up, as I said, reevaluating my storage strategy and it has been working fine since. On the rare occasion plex doesn't pick something up, I manually rename it in plex, but there are far and few between.
 

SweetAndLow

Sweet'NASty
Joined
Nov 6, 2013
Messages
6,421
I do the exact thing you want to do. I use sonarr/radarr, transmission and Plex. First of all you can only use 1 dataset for this solution and you mount that dataset in every jail. Inside that dataset you have folders for your movies and TV shows and transmission downloads.

Basically you have your content downloaded to your transmission downloads folder and it stays there so you can seed it. You then have your filebot application or sonarr/radarr create a hard link to the movie or TV. Hard links do not use more storage space. Plex then indexes the files that have been organized by your filebot application.

Note: I have no clue what filebot is.
 
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SweetAndLow

Sweet'NASty
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Is this even possible?
You only have 2 options with sonar/radar copy or hard link. Why would it not be possible? I use the hard link for all my downloads.
 
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You only have 2 options with sonar/radar copy or hard link. Why would it not be possible? I use the hard link for all my downloads.
Where would I find that setting?
 

SweetAndLow

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Hmm, turns out that it is active by default.
 

SweetAndLow

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Yeah doing a copy my default would really screw with people
Funny though, I had Rsync tasks setup to copy downloaded stuff over to the plex media folder and wondered why my storage quota was shrinking rapidly. ln -s makes so much more sense.
 

SweetAndLow

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Funny though, I had Rsync tasks setup to copy downloaded stuff over to the plex media folder and wondered why my storage quota was shrinking rapidly. ln -s makes so much more sense.
No you probably don't want ln -s. That's for a symbolic link. If everything is in the same dataset you should use just ln for a hard link.
 
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Now this is interesting. I have two datasets, one for downloads, one for plex media. I've set up sonarr/radarr to use hardlinks between them. Are there even able to do that?
 

SweetAndLow

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Now this is interesting. I have two datasets, one for downloads, one for plex media. I've set up sonarr/radarr to use hardlinks between them. Are there even able to do that?
No, you are using the copy feature.
 
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So my storage is shrinking twice as fast, huh. Best practice seems to be to have everything in one dataset then.
 

SweetAndLow

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So my storage is shrinking twice as fast, huh. Best practice seems to be to have everything in one dataset then.
Yep or just do a move and delete
 
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