When you have some torrent where there is a huge collection of files only some of which you want right now, but maybe you will come back to it later to get something else.
Example: This is a listing for torrents of audiobooks from The Eye. (Alphabetically by author, one torrent per letter.)
So I don’t want to download every audiobook ever. I selectively choose which to download. Then the torrent is “completed” when those are done. But I want to keep them around because maybe later I want something else. I just leave them in the queue?
In the torrent apps I’ve used, they seem to get confused by these. If you move the downloaded file to a proper location in your filesystem, then it is having a “missing files” error, unable to seed, and the torrent is in error state. But if you leave the obtained files, it’s still in the “not yet downloaded” directory forever.
Wondering if there is some smart way of managing this, or what?
If you’re using the *arr apps (Sonarr/Radarr/etc) for managing the sourcing and downloading of your torrents, they natively support using hard-links for “moving” the torrent files to their required location in the media server directory structure. It’s a hardlink instead of a symlink as well which also means the copies don’t rely on each other. They can each be moved/renamed/deleted without breaking the other file. Trash guides is a really helpful guide for setting up the *arr apps properly which includes a section on hard-links. https://trash-guides.info/
I don’t use *arrs. A few years ago they were way more than I needed and quite complex to get going. I get the impression they are more mature now. Maybe is time to check out again.
I will look through the website you suggest. At first glance I am at odds with the author as I’m not at all “picky”. But probably something to glean about how to work things out anyway.