Wiki / Cleanup & arr rules
Monitoring and searching
These are the actions most likely to do something you did not intend, because the difference between them is about what gets asked of the indexers.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Which episodes to monitor | Don't change leaves episodes alone and only flips the show itself. |
| episodes: unwatched by… (then pick whose progress) | Monitors the aired episodes this person has not watched. Additive — it never unmonitors anything. Sonarr already monitors everything yet to air; this adds the aired gaps. |
| unmonitor before their position | Unmonitors every aired episode at or before their latest watched one, including unwatched gaps they skipped. Off is the default additive behaviour. Unaired episodes and specials are never touched either way. |
| current season only (appears once a person is picked) | Searches only the season they are on. Later seasons stay monitored, so Sonarr takes them when they appear — it just does not ask indexers for seasons nothing has checked for a release. Turn it on for a 4K instance, where most seasons of an older show simply do not exist in 2160p; leave it off on your main instance, where you want every gap filled. |
| whole season → search the season | The only way a season pack is among the candidates. A season with some episodes already on disk keeps searching episode by episode, so a pack cannot re-download what you have. |
| Episodes first, then the season | Searches the missing episodes one by one, then the season on the next run — for a season missing entirely, so a pack can be found. Only missing episodes are asked for, so it does not chase upgrades of ones you have. Unticked, the show gets one whole-show search. |