SabNzb creating its own directories

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Virsuvius
Newbie
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Posts: 1
Joined: April 4th, 2025, 12:30 pm

SabNzb creating its own directories

Post by Virsuvius »

Hello
Ive been running Sabnzbd for many years now and its been almost flawless for me until four or five builds ago. Ive tried to debug it myself but Im now at a lost. I even went as far as rebuilding the entire VM but no luck. Im running it in a HyperV VM on a 2022 Server. The software build is 4.5. The VM is a Windows 11 24H2.

The issue I am having is Sab is not following the sorting rules for a lot of the shows its downloading anymore. For example lets say I tell one of the RR apps to grab SWAT and place it in SWAT (2017) with a subfolder for each season #. Sometimes it will use the SWAT (2017) directory but a lot of times it will create a S.W.A.T folder, then create sWaT with the current season in each folder. Each time naming it slightly different but still recognizable as SWAT. When this happens the RR app thinks the show hasnt downloaded and will try again until I clean up the directory tree and put the shows into the correct folder. At times Ive seen multiple copies of the same episode in multiple locations on my drives.

Have you seen this behavior before? Let me know if you would like screenshots or a copy of my config.

Thank you
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jcfp
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Joined: February 7th, 2008, 12:45 pm

Re: SabNzb creating its own directories

Post by jcfp »

In contrast to third-party apps that gather information from outside sources and databases, sabnzbd is blissfully unaware of what the nzb it's downloading is supposed to be, beyond what limited info it can gather from the job title (itself based on the nzb file name) and nzb metadata (if present). As a result, variations in a show's name found "out there" cause subtle changes in sabnzbd sorting outcome; in your case, for the show title and hence the directory name.

You're almost certainly better off leaving the sorting for such jobs to the third party app in question.
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