Update | Date |
---|---|
First version of the setup | 01/08/2021 |
Updated the general formatting Gave the guide a once over with LanguageTool | 14/03/2022 |
When passing folders into a Docker container it is treated as its own filesystem, if you pass multiple folders through as separate mount points they are treated as though they are independent of each other.
This means when moving files between two mount points Docker will do a Copy, then delete operation. Meaning you are creating a full duplicate of a file while its being ‘moved’ created unwanted disk IO and temporarily taking up double the space. (especially when seeding torrents after copying to the final folders)
In order to avoid this we need to set up a clean directory structure that allows us to just have one folder or share 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’. If you change its name you will need to adjust any steps or compose files from my guides accordingly.
Open up the control panel then in ‘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 /data/media create
- movies
- music
- tv
Then under /data/torrents create
- completed
- incoming
- watch
Then under /data/usenet create
- completed
- intermediate
- nzb
- queue
Your folder tree should now look like this.

That’s all your folders’ setup, you can now move onto step 2 where we will set up a Docker user.
Step 2: Setting up a restricted Docker user
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Hello, I just discovered your blog, it’s a gold mine.
Should I use the same permissions/configuration for the
docker
shared folder? I can’t find the setup of this folder on any article, all of them assume its existence. Thank you!Hey, it will be created when you install the Docker from package center. Then give you docker user read/write access
I thought it was installed, I uninstalled it earlier… Thank you!
Can I use the same data folders for Radarr that were setup for Sonarr?
You need to keep your Movies and TV shows split into independent folders. If you are referring to the root folders. See page 2 of the Sonarr and Radarr guides..