Media automation without filling the disk

An automated media stack — a couple of *arr apps, a torrent client, a request frontend — will quietly eat every byte you give it. Not because it’s broken, but because the defaults optimise for quality, and nobody optimises for your disk. This guide is the set of settings that keep a library from ballooning, learned the day a pool hit 89%.

Where the space actually goes

Three culprits, in order of damage:

1. Remux and 2160p grabs. A 1080p Remux is 30–45 GB for one film — a full Blu-ray disc rip with lossless audio. Multiply by a library and you’re out of disk in a weekend.
2. Copy-imports. If hardlinks aren’t set up, importing a download copies it into the library — so the file now exists twice: once seeding, once in the library. Your 40 GB film is 80 GB.
3. Orphaned seeds. Delete a film in the library and the torrent keeps seeding the file. Space isn’t freed until the torrent is removed too.

Fix all three and a library shrinks by more than half without losing a thing you wanted.

Quality: the tier is not a size cap

The instinct is to set the quality profile to “1080p” and move on. That’s not enough. A quality tier like Bluray-1080p spans a 3 GB x265 encode and a 25 GB x264-with-lossless-audio encode — both are “Bluray-1080p”. Picking the tier does nothing to bound size.

Three settings, together, are what actually work:

1. Disallow the bloat tiers

In the quality profile, turn off:

• Remux (all resolutions)
• all 2160p / UHD
• BR-DISK, Raw-HD

Leave WEBDL-1080p and Bluray-1080p (these are encodes, not disc rips). That alone kills the 40 GB grabs.

2. Set a real size ceiling

This is the lever people miss. In Quality Definitions, every tier has a max size in MB per minute — and the defaults are enormous. Cap the 1080p tiers at roughly 50 MB/min:

• a ~2-hour film → ~9 GB max
• a ~45-min episode → ~2.3 GB max

Now the 25 GB x264-lossless release is rejected at grab time — it physically can’t be selected. This is the setting that turns “prefer smaller” from a wish into a rule.

3. Prefer x265, penalise lossless

Custom Formats nudge the picker among releases that pass the cap:

x265 (HEVC)     ReleaseTitle  (?i)\b(x265|h265|hevc)\b     score +100
Lossless Audio  ReleaseTitle  (?i)(DTS-HD|TrueHD|FLAC|PCM|Atmos)   score −80

Keep the minimum-format-score at 0 so these are preferences, not gates — you still get a grab if only x264 exists, it’s just the last resort.

The result

Remux 44 GB → x264 encode 24 GB → x265 encode 6 GB. Same film, ~7× smaller, and the size cap makes it automatic for every future grab.

Hardlinks: make imports free

By default, importing a completed download copies it into your library — two copies, double the space. Turn on “Use hardlinks instead of copy” in the *arr’s media-management settings, and keep the download and library folders on the same filesystem (this is why the classic layout mounts one shared /data with torrents/ and media/ as subfolders — a hardlink can’t cross filesystems).

With hardlinks on, the library entry and the seeding file are the same bytes on disk with two names. The film counts once. Seeding continues. Deleting one name leaves the other untouched.

Check it’s actually working

A hardlinked file shows a link count of 2 (ls -l second column, or stat). If your imports show link count 1, hardlinks aren’t happening — usually because the paths are on different mounts, or the setting was flipped on after those files were imported (it doesn’t apply retroactively).

Re-importing without breaking the seed

If you ever delete a library file but the download is still seeding it, the *arr’s database goes stale — it thinks the file exists, and on the next scan it re-downloads it. To fix without a re-download: refresh the item (clears the stale record), then manually import from the still-seeding file using “Copy” mode. With hardlinks on, “Copy” makes a hardlink — the library gets the file back, the seed keeps running, zero extra space. (“Move” would relocate the file and break seeding — don’t.)

The seeding lifecycle

Seeding is good manners, but infinite seeding is a slow disk leak. Give the torrent client a share limit: stop at a ratio or a time, whichever comes first, and remove the torrent and its files when it hits.

A reasonable public-tracker policy: ratio 1.0 or 14 days. You’ve given back what you took, and the file clears itself.

Private trackers need protecting

Private trackers enforce minimum seed times — an aggressive ratio limit can trigger a hit-and-run and get you warned or banned. If you use any, either raise their threshold, exclude them from the auto-remove, or maintain a ratio buffer elsewhere. Public trackers have no such obligation — drain freely.

Deleting things properly

The golden rule: the *arr is the source of truth. Delete there, not in the player.

• Delete in the media manager (*arr), with “delete files”. That removes the library copy. But remember culprit #3 — if a torrent still seeds that file, the space isn’t back until you remove the torrent too.
• Don’t delete from the player (Jellyfin/Plex). The file vanishes but every other service still thinks it exists — you get “missing episode” states and confused re-downloads.
• Failed grabs: turn on “Remove failed downloads” on the download-client config so a stalled or rejected grab is cleaned from the client automatically — otherwise it sits there downloading to nowhere. Leave “Remove completed” off, or you’ll kill your own seeding the moment a file imports.
• The request frontend caches availability. After you remove media, the requester (Overseerr/Jellyseerr) still shows it as available until its availability-sync job runs — daily by default. Trigger it manually if you want the status correct immediately; otherwise it reconciles overnight. Not a bug, just a schedule.

The mindset

Storage discipline in a media stack isn’t a one-time cleanup, it’s a few defaults that make the automation respect your disk:

• a size cap, so quality can’t run away,
• hardlinks, so nothing is stored twice,
• a seeding limit, so torrents clean up after themselves,
• and one place to delete from.

Set those once and the library stops being a thing you firefight. The extra drive you were about to buy becomes a nice-to-have instead of an emergency.