Using rclone Mount and rar2fs with Plex?

Hello,

I have a lot of content that resides inside rar files, since before using rclone and moving everything to the cloud, I used local storage and rar2fs to serve the unrar files directly to Plex. This was a great setup as I didn't need to unrar the content and could seed the files directly without double storage.

Since then, I moved all my content to the cloud, and kept using rar2fs, yet as my collection keeps growing, I'm starting to feel the pain of this double layer. as each time I remount rar2fs (every restart) it needs to warm it's own cache which ends up taking almost close to two days. This is because rar2fs needs to fetch each rar file and read the inside contents to know what to show, while it doesn't need to download the whole file, it does mean it needs to grab each file at least one time which takes some time.

My question is if somebody has this setup running and has any optimization tips? I guess I will need to eventually unrar all content and reupload it to the cloud as a long term solution, but wonder if anybody has something similar setup and how it's working for you.

Thanks!

Seems you did a copy paste of my post

But I've made good progress in making rar2fs work with rclone. Be sure to mount rar2fs with the following flags: --seek-length=1.warmup

--seek-length=1 will just analyze the first rar file of the folder, this means way less polling as only part of one rar will be downloaded.
warmup will analyze all the rar files in the mount before you even try to list them. Even better it will use multiple threads (default 5) so it will be way faster.

Please note you need the last commit for this to work, as latest release (1.28 as of right now) doesn't include it yet.

Hope this helps anybody.

1 Like