SABnzbd Forums

I recently upgraded SAB to 0.7.20 running on a Windows 7 notebook and ever since all my downloads are failing with "Download Failed - Out of your server's retention?" error message. Surely not all of them could be the result of DMCA takedowns!!
I've done the following steps one at a time to troubleshoot the issue:

1. Upgraded Sickbeard to Win32 alpha build 503
2. Changed the order of indexers in Sickbeard and added new indexers
3. Changed the quality of downloads in Sickbeard
4. Changed the retry time from 60 minutes to 20minutes
5. Changed Usenet provider in SAB from usenetbucket to newshosting and back
6. Manually selected a NZB from an indexer and SAB still fails the download
7. Downloaded and tried Sonarr but to no avail

Nothing seems to fix the problem, I noticed that the failed downloads show over 1500 missing articles. I can tell when a download will fail by looking at the download progress bar and the number of mb's would spike erratically and the "Time Left" counter goes bonkers.

Any help from the experts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Try another Usenet client (Grabit) and download with an NZB
that you are quite sure that it should be on the server(s).

BTW: check any retention time settings in Config->Servers.
The safest is to remove all retention time settings.

Thanks Shypike, I'll try those suggestions and get back to you!

Here's what I've found:

1. I was able to manually select a a different NZB file and SAB downloaded it without any issues
2. So it looks like SAB (or Sickbeard) is not automatically retrying with a different NZB file for a failed download
3. Retention time is not set for any server

Do you think it would help if I turned on the "new_nzb_on_failure" switch in SAB? Because I'm thinking either SAB or Sickbeard or both need to be configured to try another NZB file if the primary fails. Also I'm not sure how Sickbeard chooses a NZB file if it finds multiple NZB files of the same quality for the same show? For example, it found season 04 episode 01 of the show called Episodes and Sickbeard log shows that it found multiple NZB files of the same quality for this episode and used its selection algorithm to choose and send one to SAB. But it sends the same 'bad' file over and over again no matter what settings I change for that episode in Sickbeard.
On the other side, SAB receives a bad NZB, tries to download it and fails but doesn't retry ever.

So I'm not sure if the issue is with Sickbeard or SAB or both, as it boils down to Sickbeard selecting a 'good' NZB file and sending it to SAB handling failed downloads automatically.

I guess my question is what, if any, configuration changes can I do in SAB to automatically try different NZBs?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

socketmail wrote: Do you think it would help if I turned on the "new_nzb_on_failure" switch in SAB?

When using SickBeard, SABnzbd should just act in the simplest way.
It will download any NZB sent by SickBeard and report the result back.
It's up to SickBeard to act intelligently.

The new option is for when you're not using SickBeard but are using a Usenet indexer
that supports alternative NZBs.
Some do. From the top of my head: I think that oznzb.com supports it.