Hint The difference between torrenting on a PC and NAS - Common issues, Best Practices

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Silas Mariusz

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The difference between Torrenting & Torrenting

Purpose
The main advantage of Rtorrent-Pro on a NAS is a:
  • new, more efficient way to manage and download torrents,
  • handle up to several thousand of torrents jobs at the same time,
  • keep torrents seeding as long as needed even if user decided to delete downloaded content from archive,
  • keep the download directories structure clean - no need to cleanup files on your NAS every weekend,
  • interact with other applications on the server creating one big eco-system with your torrents data!

Torrenting on PC or a Mac
Disadvantages:
  • space storage is mostly limited,
  • no flexible seeding options,
  • impossible to delete and seed torrent data same time(!) to avoid Hit-and-Run policy,
  • computer must be always on and its performance might be affected during downloads,
  • downloadeded media items are not organized,

Change Is Always A Good Thing

Bad practicies vs Rtorrent-Pro

While using torrents on PC, you've learned that the only one automation offered you so far by a download client is moving completed torrents to the 'complete' directory and it was nice... - yes, but 15 years ago!
Today with gigabit fiber Internet links and bigger capacity drives, users are able to save 4 tousands of BD movies on just two single 20TB drives! This couldn't be possible to manage by torrent client without new ideas and strategies introduced to improve torrent download process.

Rtorrent-Pro like other torrent clients support torrent moving from A to B, but instead of simple torrent moving offered by other clients, it helps you on first steps to quickly assign torrents into categories (labels) eg. movie, software or music, and then will take care and handle your downloads automatically without any needed additional human ingeration.

Rtorrent-Pro acts more like a server service and provides such additional roles on your storage:
  • simplified torrent downloading,
  • keep clutter-free downloads repository,
  • integrate with media centers or other LAN devices!
Unfortunatelly still at least 60% of NAS torrenting users don't move forward and they stuck with old download methods.


QNAP only! 6 wonderful things you can do with Rtorrent-Pro?
  1. Don't open Rtorrent-Pro to start new downloads. Use watch directory instead!
    Just save .torrent file into watch directory. Read guide here.
    This is super easy even while using VPN!

  2. Don't need to monitor download progress status and wait until torrents get finished!
    Just configure download complete notification by Skype, FB, Telegram script, SMSC service with QTS Notification Center!

  3. Don't stop using labels and don't switch off automation in Rtorrent-Pro!
    Label directories in complete/download/watch are RECOMMENDED for all users!
    Start using labels today! This is super easy and does not require extra skills or time to reconfiguration!
    Simply, add new movie .torrent file into 'watch/movie' directory to assign it as a movie, or if it's a kids stuff like a cartoons, push that .torrent into Kids label instead. The same do for applications or iso-games, same them in watch/software or watch/game. Rtorrent-Pro will do the rest properly and better than human.1​2​3​4​

  4. Using labels helps to determinate what kind of action should be done on download complete.
    Eg. if you downloaded rar files with Movies or TV Shows inside of them, Rtorrent-Pro will automatically extract and parse that movies for you. However if you downloaded zipped content like software, it might be not necessary to extract such files. In most cases extracting of software is not a good idea, since RAW installers may included zip or cab files. When enabling autounpack feature please consider apply regex exception rule for software/0day label or keep this feature enabled for ISO stuff only.

  5. Use medialibrary!
    Because it organize and sort your stuff, download metadata, posters and fanarts automatically for your movies.
    Main advantage of medialibrary:
    • Downloaded movies and tv-shows are organized automatically.
      Destination path is designed to be used with external apps on the NAS like Plex or other media centers
    • 4K movies/tv-shows goes into sub category.
      Useful to seperate 4K content to prevent unwanted transcoding when sharing movies with Plex on low-performance NAS servers
    • Kids and Adult stuff goes into other paths.
      Useful for Kids and to hide XXX stuff!

  6. Use hardlinks(!) function to move files between downloads, complete or medialibrary.
    Rtorrent-Pro can move finished torrent from download to complete as any other torrent client. But Rtorrent-Pro offers hardlinks which are more flexible.
    With hardlinks you don't have about torrent date, if you did a copy and etc. It's allowed to do with such torrent this:
    - delete torrent from complete location, but don't stop seeding from download location
    or this ;
    - stop seeding torrent and delete it from downloads, but archive it and keep a copy in your complete repository

    NOTE
    While using hardlinks the only correct way to Remove old torrents is to delete them in Advanced UI. To do this open Advanced UI, click right mouse button on the torrent job, and select Remove and Delete Data.
    This will stop seeding and will delete data from 'downloads' directory, however it hardlinked copy will not be deleted from complete/medialibrary as this destination is treated to be your archive destination.


Challange
Why not to try and download tousands of torrents and realize the difference between Rtorrent-Pro and other solutions?


Summary

Benefits of using Rtorrent-Pro if you followed 6 tricks above!
  • don't need extra PC/Mac Remote Client desktop app to manage downloads
  • don't need to add torrents one-by-one from UI
  • don't need to bother about low ratio or Hit-and-Run on private trackers
  • don't need to organize and clean-up your download pool with media files
  • don't need to monitor your downloads since there are notification by mobile

---
1​ - if you can't find appropriate labels in torrent startup directory watch, eg. when you are musician and downloading a VST plugins or downloading 3dmax models, just create that directories in 'watch' directory. Rtorrent-Pro will sort that data and treat it with no organize destination even if content is mixed stuff containing music albums, movie files or software stuff.

2​ - Rtorrent-Pro very easily recognize cinema content and match it to IMDB and TMDB searches and is able to move content to media library even if user did not assign stuff as movie, tv, kids, adult or anime. In this case Rtorrent-Pro will do same magical stuff as for categorized files, but will not cleanup library from that files.

3​ - Doesn't matter if auto-unpack feature is on or off, Rtorrent-Pro will always extract rarred or zipped media items like movies or tv shows and delete rar/zip archives after they are extracted, but only when Media Library is ON and user confirmed torrent content and assigned it as any of media labels:
Instrukcja - Media Library structure (4K/UHD auto detection)

4​ - It's allowed to store complete label categories stuff on different disk volumes. However this feature is not available from GUI and has to be done manually from FAQ SSH. Rtorrent-Pro provides tools like Midnight Commander for easier replacing output label directories with symlinks pointing to other disk volumes. Follow this video guide: Podpowiedź - How to move medialibrary/FileBot movies or tvshows output directory into another disk path? [Video] (NOTE: Hardlinks will not work between two different disk volumes. But don't worry, you don't need to stop using them. Rtorrent-Pro will automatically detect different destination and fallback from hardlink top copy method instead)
 
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