Introducing Archivarr: An *arr inspired media backup tool
Hey all,
I’ve been running a pretty standard *arr setup for a while and kept running into the same annoying issue — backups/archiving.
Stuff like:
- External drives getting out of sync
- Not knowing what’s actually backed up vs not
- Copying a bunch of random junk files along with media
- No good way to track what lives on which drive
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY
- Being required to have all archive drives plugged in at once to track what is backed up.
After dealing with that way too many times, I ended up building a small app to handle it.
It’s called Archivarr: https://github.com/DanBrown95/archivarr
What it does (at a high level)
It’s basically a companion app for *arr stacks that focuses on:
- Backing up media in a smarter way (movies, shows, music + useful metadata)
- Skipping a lot of the random extra files you don’t actually care about
- Keeping track of what files exist on which archive drives (especially helpful for offline/cold storage)
- The ability to regularly schedule scans of your media directory
It doesn’t try to replace Sonarr/Radarr or anything — it just sits alongside your setup and allows you to track whats backed up where, what needs to be backed up, and a one click archive process.
Why I made it
Most of the tools I tried were either:
- too generic (rsync scripts, etc.)
- or just didn’t really “get” media libraries
What I actually wanted was something that could answer:
“Do I already have this backed up somewhere?”
without digging through drives manually and requiring all archive drives to be live.
Current state
It’s stable enough that I’ve created a v1.0.0 tag and am using it myself, but there are gaps and I would love community feedback and involvement to really make this a *arr companion app.
If anyone wants to try it out, I’d really appreciate:
- feedback (even “this is confusing” helps)
- bug reports
- feature ideas
Stuff I’m thinking about adding
- ability to set scheduled archive jobs (currently supports scheduled scan jobs)
- tighter integration with Sonarr/Radarr
- performance optimization
- mobile friendly/responsive UI
Anyway, figured I’d share in case this solves a problem for anyone else.
Happy to answer questions or hear how other people are handling archives.