I was running my Unraid server for years with Sonarr/Radarr and supporting apps running inside a Windows VM on the Unraid server. Besides personal file backup, main purpose is media server with Emby. Was running FileFlows server as a docker, with FileFlows node running on a separate Windows PC for media compression. I'm in the process of taking down the VM and have transferred all the VM apps to docker apps on the Unraid server. I'll attach an image for clarification.

Basically, Sonarr/Radarr download videos with qbittorrent and SABnzbd to Unraid:

/complete/tv
/complete/movies

FileFlows recommends using remote path mappings to keep Sonarr/Radarr importer from grabbing the non-processed files before conversion. Completed files (after FileFlows), go to:

/converted/tv

/converted/movies

When FileFlows sees a new file, it tells an active node to start processing it. The Ubuntu PC (node), then copies the file from /complete/tv (for Sonarr files) to the Ubuntu's file system at:

/home/chad/FileFlows/Temp

It processes them there with FFMPEG and some other tools, and when done, moves the completed file (with the same filename) to /converted/tv. Here's where the problem is. Sonarr has a fixed 1 minute file import interval where it monitors the /converted/tv directory for the files to show up, and when it sees them it starts moving them to the Unraid file system where they belong while renaming them. It has no way of knowing if the file it is moving has been fully moved first, so it often is moving half-moved files.

I didn't have this problem with the prior setup with Windows. I'm guessing since Sonarr and the separate Windows PC node transferring files around using SMB shares, files were locked better by one of the systems, and I never had half-moved files getting transferred.

This has happened with some movie files also, and Radarr's Completed Download Handling was set to 1 minute. I changed that to 120 minutes and that is now fine. The problem is Sonarr doesn't have such a setting and has told the community they are not implementing it, so there is no way for me to delay it scanning for completed media imports, and the 1 minute is screwing up a ton of files. The only thing I've been able to do to remedy this is turn off Sonarr's Completed Download Handing completely, which removes them from the Activity Queue as soon as they are done downloading. Then I wait until nothing is processing, turn Sonarr's Completed Download Handling back on, go to Activity Queue and hit refresh a couple of times. Then files that were in-process show up again, and if anything is still being processed by FileFlows, they show up there, and things that are being held at /converted/tv get imported and moved. Then I turn off download handling again and rinse and repeat when needed.

Is there some way around this that anybody knows of? I'm sure there is some sort of script I could schedule to run on Sonarr like once/day to handle this, but it would be nice if I could have downloaded->converted media to auto-populate as before.

Some extra info:

Ubuntu node connects to Unraid server with NFS file sharing via fstab as follows:

192.168.101.102:/mnt/user/complete /media/complete nfs defaults,_netdev,hard,intr 0 0

192.168.101.102:/mnt/user/converted /media/converted nfs defaults,_netdev,hard,intr 0 0

192.168.101.102:/mnt/user/movies /media/movies nfs defaults,_netdev,hard,intr 0 0

192.168.101.102:/mnt/user/tv /media/tv nfs defaults,_netdev,hard,intr 0 0

Note, mapping from Ubuntu server needs to be /mnt/user before the actual shares (/complete, /converted, etc.) to work, here is Unraid exportfs:

root@Unraid:~# exportfs -v

/mnt/user/complete <world>(async,wdelay,hide,no_subtree_check,fsid=100,anonuid=99,anongid=100,sec=sys,rw,insecure,root_squash,all_squash)

/mnt/user/converted <world>(async,wdelay,hide,no_subtree_check,fsid=101,anonuid=99,anongid=100,sec=sys,rw,insecure,root_squash,all_squash)

/mnt/user/movies <world>(async,wdelay,hide,no_subtree_check,fsid=102,anonuid=99,anongid=100,sec=sys,rw,insecure,root_squash,all_squash)

/mnt/user/tv <world>(async,wdelay,hide,no_subtree_check,fsid=103,anonuid=99,anongid=100,sec=sys,rw,insecure,root_squash,all_squash)

Sonarr remote path mappings setup as: Host: 192.168.101.102 Remote Path: /complete/tv Local Path: /converted/tv

Edited September 18, 2025Sep 18 by wills

In case anyone else has this problem, I resolved it in FileFlows GUI -> Settings -> General by enabling "Temp Files for Moving/Copying". It then changes the filename extension to .ffmpeg while moving and then back to .mkv (or whatever you have set) at the end.