SABnzbd Forums

Hello all, I have been using SABnzbd for years but I'm trying to streamline my workflow and I'm having a little trouble figuring out exactly what SAB is doing.

I am grabbing an .nzb from and indexer site that downloads a password-protected .rar that contains the .nzb for the actual video file I want to download. I have a category set up to download .nzb files to a specific NZB directory, without job folders so it should just dump any downloaded .nzb files there. Then I have that folder set as the watched folder in SAB so it will pick up the .nzbs that have been extracted from the password-protected .rars. The picked-up .nzb files then get added to the queue and I have other categories set up to route them into other download folders. Hope all that makes sense.

This all works fine as long as my "NZB" category is set to "+Unpack", but the problem is it leaves the original pw-protected .rar files behind in the NZB directory.

If I change it to "+Delete" it disrupts the workflow by downloading the pw-protected .rar, extracting the .nzb, adding the .nzb to the queue then deleting the entire NZB directory, downloading the video file, then re-creating the NZB directory and dropping the video file into it ignoring all my other categories. At least that's what I think it's doing, when I would expect it to just delete the pw-protected .rar and leave the .nzb there to be picked up on the next watched-folder scan.

Any ideas or options to make this work, without leaving .rar files behind that have to be cleaned up manually? I am running Windows 10. Thanks!

If a job contains only other nzb files, these will be automatically redirected to the queue, with the same job settings. In case there's only a single nzb in your initial download, it will also keep the job name. See here for the inner workings.

That means your workflow of extracting nzb-only jobs into the watch dir only to get sab to pick them up again is - at the very least - an unnecessary detour. Simply handle such jobs as if you already had the final nzb on hand (including category settings and the likes) and you're all set.