Hello! Just set up Unraid this weekend - mostly going well, but now having problems with my cache filling up from Qbittorrent downloads, and the mover won't move any of the media from the cache to my array.

Ideally my files will move from cache to array once downloaded, and automatically linked to start seeding. But it seems the seeding is being done from the cache. I tried stopping seeding and running the mover, but no luck. Also tried with mover tuning plugin installed / uninstalled but again no luck.

I'm using sonarr and radarr to download and manage files, and I have hardlinks set up

tower-diagnostics-20250728-0914.zip

Note that the mover won't move open files, e.g., seeding torrents that are being accessed.

Enable mover logging, run the mover, post new diags.

Also make sure mover tuning is NOT installed for this test.

Here is the new diags with mover logs. In the logs I'm seeing "has 1 dangling link(s)", but I'm 100% sure nothing is seeding.

Mover tuning currently NOT installed

tower-diagnostics-20250728-1047.zip

Are you using symlinks?

Radarr and Sonarr are using hardlinks (not sure about symlinks, so likely not)

Not exactly sure what that message means , but it's likely related to one of those, though the mover supports them.

ok, one issue I'm seeing is that my cache has a /media folder, which shouldnt exist. it is full of all my downloads since setting up unraid a few days ago. This is whats filling up the drive. BUT my share setting for media has always been array for primary storage, and no secondary. Why is this happening?

49 minutes ago, Dispoze said:

BUT my share setting for media has always been array for primary storage, and no secondary. Why is this happening?

Chances are that you are falling Gould of the behaviour described in the Caution section of online documentation here

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

Chances are that you are falling Gould of the behaviour described in the Caution section of online documentation here

Read the cautions in those docs, what would be my solution then?

11 hours ago, Dispoze said:

Read the cautions in those docs, what would be my solution then?

If you think the Caution applies then you either need to correct whatever app is causing the issue so it no longer causes it or (probably easiest) set the share up so that it is Primary Cache: Secondary Array : Mover cache->Array so that the files later get transferred to the array.

8 hours ago, itimpi said:

If you think the Caution applies then you either need to correct whatever app is causing the issue so it no longer causes it or (probably easiest) set the share up so that it is Primary Cache: Secondary Array : Mover cache->Array so that the files later get transferred to the array.

so I'm currently manually moving everything now from /media on cache to /media on array.

What I'm trying to achieve is:

- Use radarr to download media through qbittorrent
- Qbittorrent downloads media to cache
- radarr moves movie to array
- qbittorrent start seeding movie from array

Is this possible? Sorry for getting sidetracked

39 minutes ago, Dispoze said:

radarr moves movie to array

I suspect that this is the cause of your trouble if radarr is trying to use a linux level move command to transfer files to the 'media' share which is by-passing the Unraid Share level and leaving the file on the cache in a 'media' folder. As I said the easiest workaround is to simply to set the share up as I described so that Unraid thinks the file is being cached and mover will later transfer the files to the array.

ok, this seemed to work!! Thanks for the tip - and I think you're right, radarr is likely putting them in the cache, but not sure why as I thought my setup is correct:




Then qbittorrent downloads to this on the cache:

29 minutes ago, Dispoze said:

radarr is likely putting them in the cache, but not sure why as I thought my setup is correct:

That will be because radarr is trying to ‘move’ them to the ‘media’ share, but because of the behaviour mentioned in the Caution they remain on the cache pool. If radar had instead used a copy/delete strategy they would have ended up on the array as you expected.

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

That will be because radarr is trying to ‘move’ them to the ‘media’ share, but because of the behaviour mentioned in the Caution they remain on the cache pool. If radar had instead used a copy/delete strategy they would have ended up on the array as you expected.

Doesn't it need to be set up like this though if I want to have access to the media, but also seed it (the hard-links part)?

@Dispoze just to confirm,are you still seeing those "dangling link" errors when running the mover?

So I was able to get more info about what this "dangling link" error means from LT; basically, it means the mover is not finding all the links it expects to find for that file. Are you hardlinking files from one share to another, e.g.:

Say you have a file being downloaded to a cache only share called downloads: /mnt/cache/downloads/file

And then you or an app creates a hardlink to a different share, e.g., /mnt/cache/media/file

If the media file is set to cache=yes and you run the mover, you would get that "dangling link" error, since the mover would expect to see that file twice, but it will only find one copy, because each share is like a separate file system for the mover if there are hardlinks.

Yes! Figured it out, the hardlinks were the issue

Basically I had a torrent downloaded to /mnt/cache/downloads/ which hardlinked to /mnt/cache/media so plex could access it ASAP. After that, I could remove the file from downloads (which was the dangling link) and run the mover, which would move from cache/media to array/media. For seeding, I just used cross-seed to look for all media in the array. Maybe not the perfect flow but works well for me!

Thanks for checking in!

Edited August 8, 2025Aug 8 by Dispoze