SABnzbd Forums

I've noticed that Sabnzbd won't attempt to extract downloads, if there isn't sufficient parity data to verify the file integrity. Since archives have rudimentary integrity validation, I would hope that Sabnzb would at least try to extract the archives and only complain if that process also fails.

There is an option that allows you to ignore the verification status.
Config->Switches "Only post-process verified posts". Turn that off.
You'll end up with a partially unpacked folder, not very useful.

I'll give that a shot. I don't mean that I want to extract archives that FAIL an integrity check, but if there isn't enough parity data to actually perform the check then I'd like to try extracting anyway.

It almost never happens that there are not enough par2 files to verify the job.
That only happens when no par2 files are available or are very corrupt.
In that case SABnzbd will fall back on an SFV-based check, if enabled and an SFV file is present.

I ask, because this happens fairly frequently with me. Perhaps one of my NZB sources has a particularly bad retention rate for parity files, but frequently I'm stuck manually extracting, moving, and renaming my files, because there were missing par2 and SFV files.

Look for a better NZB source and/or Usenet provider.
SABnzbd isn't designed to assist you in "old-fashioned" manual parring and rarring.
Either that or find a program that supports this better.
SABnzbd is aimed at hands-off automation.

I certainly don't want SABnzbd do do anything that it's not designed to do. I, too, desire for it to provide hands-off automation for a repetitive task.

Can you explain how "'old-fashioned' manual parring and rarring" doesn't fit within SABnzbd's scope? I've always understood that the point of SABnzbd is to download, repair (if necessary), and extract. It's done this very well, other than in this scenario. What are other people using it for?

Also, what's the new-fashioned method to par and rar?

Thanks for taking the time!

You misunderstand.
If the reliability of your NZBs or provider is such that you very often
need to do post processing manually, then SABnzbd may not the most practical program for you.
It's not that it's unusable, only that it may be a bit less helpful than other programs.
We don't lay emphasis on interactive usage.
But if it works for you: all the better.

I'm definitely confused, then. Unless your Usenet client supports automatic post-processing, the user would always need to verify/repair and extract manually. Isn't that the power of SABnzbd (well, that and the ability to tie into external scripts to do things like move and organize a media library)?

For example, if I use Grab-It, it will download all of the articles in an NZB, combine them into binary files, perform a parity check/repair, and then extract. This is also true of SABnzbd. The only exception to this case that I've found is when the NZB is missing a few parity files. This doesn't automatically mean that the files are corrupt; it just means that SABnzbd can't verify the data integrity. It could still attempt an extraction at that point, which would fail in the case of corrupt data. At that point I'd go rooting around for the missing parity files (adding another supplementary NZB to an incomplete download is one of my favorite SABnzbd features, btw.)

Since these are the steps I would manually follow, when downloading from Usenet with an NZB, does it not make sense that I would expect my automated downloader to do the same?

Board discussions don't always work, like in this case.
If you're happy with SABnzbd, all the better.
In your posts I was reading some comments about the way it works that I did not agree with.
Or thought I didn't

I'm very happy with SABnzbd. If you think this is a viable issue, where can I officially make a request?

We have a feature request board.