| Update | Date |
|---|---|
| First version of the setup | 01/08/2021 |
The way Docker handles file mounts is that each time you pass a new directory or volume through to a container it will treat it like a separate filesystem, this means when your downloads complete rather than the file being instantly moved, it will be copied to the new destination then deleted from the source… this obviously takes longer, temporarily uses twice the amount of space (longer if you are seeding a torrent) and adds unnecessary work for your NAS.
In order to avoid this we need to setup a clean directory structure that will allow us to just have one folder mounted to our containers.
If you are starting with these guides and have existing media you may need to move around your data in line with this setup.
Directory Structure
With this setup all of your media will sit within a single share, you can call this whatever you want but in all the guides it will be called ‘data’
First up head into the control panel then Shared Folder hit Create
On screen 1 fill out the name as ‘data’
Screen 2 we leave the folder unencrypted
Screen 3 – Enable data checksums as this will help catch any issues with files during data scrubbing.
Screen 4 – just click next past the summary
On the final screen we don’t need to change any user permissions yet, we will do that in the second guide.
The Sub-folders
Now we have our main ‘data’ directory we need to create a number of sub-folders to hold our media and downloaded files. You can amend this depending on whether you are using Torrents or Usenet (Newsgroups) or both.
You will initially create 3 folders within /data
- media
- torrents
- usenet
then under \media create
- movies
- music
- tv
then under \torrents create
- completed
- incoming
- watch
under \usenet create
- completed
- intermediate
- nzb
- queue
When finished you file tree should look like this.
That’s all your folders setup, you can now move onto step 2 where we will setup a Docker user.
Good guide, thank you. I do have a question though. I have an existing directory structure which I have been using for years, with separate VMs and physical infrastructure to do a lot of these things. The only thing I would like to differ from your setup here is that I have separate shares for Video, Music and Photos (photos not related to this).
Would I lose any functionality if I keep the torrents and usenet folders under data, and then have separate shares for video and music? The downside would be that it would have to copy the data (double) and then delete from the download location to the at-rest location. But other than that, would there be any issues as long as the containers for both nzbget and Sonarr have access to the same data area, and my Torrent client has access to that part?
Hey, this is exactly how I used to have it setup, you will be fine doing it this way. the key is that the containers themselves have a consistent set of mount paths so when something downloads Radarr has the same mount location so it can copy the file to your video directory.
Also just make sure that your new docker user has the permission to read and write to your paths.
Thank you, all good then. I will continue setting up the new NAS with all the different modules.
Thanks for the guide!
Strange issue I’m having though – my ‘incoming’ folder keeps getting deleted. Any idea what might be causing that?
Also, maybe I’m missing something obvious but what’s the purpose of the ‘watch’ folder?
Hey, not had that issue bit odd? If you enable the Autoadd plugin you can set the watch folder for any torrents you want to drop into that folder.
Thank you for the setup guides. Best ones I have found and you are one of the few that explain how to setup an additional user. Coffee coming your way!