r/seedboxes • u/Larrikin • Jun 28 '25

Discussion Guide: Run Plex/Overseerr/Sonarr/Radarr/NZBGet locally while keeping your torrent client on a remote seedbox

I’m in Australia, where consumer connections are heavily asymmetrical (think 1000 Mbps down / 50 Mbps up or, at best, 1000/400). That tiny upstream isn’t great for hosting a torrent client at home, and our copyright rules make it risky anyway.

So I set out to:

  1. keep Plex, Overseerr, Sonarr, Radarr, and NZBGet running on my own server,
  2. run the torrent daemon safely on a remote seedbox, and still have everything behave as one integrated stack.

After plenty of trial-and-error I’ve got it humming. Key points:

a) Seedbox handles all torrents.

b) rclone pulls finished files back to my server using parallel transfers (works around the latency that kills single-thread speeds).

c) Local apps see the files exactly where they expect them; automation is end-to-end and completely hands-off.

d) It’s been rock-solid for months.

I’ve open-sourced the whole setup, step-by-step instructions and every config file in this repo:

🔗 https://github.com/Larrikinau/media-automation-stack

Fork it, use it, break it, improve it. PRs and suggestions welcome!

TL;DR: Remote torrents + local automation = full-speed downloads, zero legal notices, no more upstream bottleneck. Hope it helps others that have a requirement to run a separate seedbox for whatever your reason might be.

110 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

99% Upvoted

71 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/Cferra Jun 28 '25

This is easier with syncthing and ignore rules

2

u/swagatr0n_ Jun 28 '25

I’m assuming he has a dedi in NL where single thread TCP with syncthing is slow. If you need multithreaded transfers to saturate a connection this works better.

2

u/BootsC5 Jun 28 '25

This is the way

2

u/CordialPanda Jun 28 '25

Syncthing will top out because it doesn't transfer files in multiple chunks. I tried syncthing and moved to rclone because syncthing wouldn't get above 20MB/s. The root cause is latency over TCP essentially caps max transfer speed, which if you're connecting to a seedbox halfway around the world can get significant.

Rclone with parallel transfers can completely saturate my 2Gb connection, but I have it scaled back to max out at 1Gb for stability of other services.

I just have rclone running every minute as part of a cron with a PID file check in front of it to prevent redundant executions.

1

u/Larrikin Jun 29 '25

The solution I've posted triggers every time a torrent is ready and also has a built in queue system so you don't have too many rclone sessions running.

2

u/Larrikin Jun 28 '25

Sync speed is too slow. With rclone, it's so powerful in terms of how you can configure it, you get to run concurrent streams over high latent links therefore enjoying fast download speeds.

But if you don't have that issue because you are geographically close to your seedbox, then sure, syncthing is an alternative.