The media pool reported 71% used. One disk inside it was at 99%. Nothing on a dashboard disagreed with anything else, until LazyLibrarian started writing book imports into its own config volume and calling it a success.

The cause was not a full disk. It was a preference: the stack had no rule about what a movie is allowed to weigh, and Radarr ships with no limit for 2160p at all.

This is the whole story: the disk, the rebalance, and the two declarative layers that now hold the policy.

The failure: 99% on one branch, 71% on the pool

The pool is mergerfs over four branches:

mergerfs used category.create=epmfs: a new file goes to the branch that already holds its directory, and free space is only compared between branches that hold it. The library directories existed on media-sda only, so every import landed there. Both other local disks were empty.

When media-sda dropped under mergerfs’ 4G minfreespace, creates failed with ENOSPC even though the pool had 788G free. That is the trap: df /mnt/media shows the union and stays calm, while the one branch that accepts writes is full.

The symptom was indirect. LazyLibrarian imported a book, could not write to /books, and fell back to its config volume:

WARNING: eBook dir ['/books'] not writeable, using /config:
[Errno 28] No space left on device: '/books/ll_temp'

The book was in the database. The file was in the wrong place. The UI said the download worked.

Rebalancing without losing anything

The first fix is movement, not deletion. mergerfs merges reads, so a folder can move to another branch and keep serving from the same path.

The numbers from that day:

Result:

Total pool content did not change: 318G before and after.

Three rules keep this safe:

1. Never delete before the copy is verified. Compare the file list and the size of every file, then delete the source.
2. Use a tab separator when reading that list. Show names contain spaces, and read -r path size silently splits Season 4 into two fields.
3. Expect a new file in the destination. Sonarr imported an episode during one copy. That is fine, the check only verifies the source list.

A trap I walked into: I first tried to move a 69G movie onto media-sda. That was the wrong direction, it filled the disk I was trying to protect. I stopped it, removed the partial copy and sent it to remote82-sda instead.

The real cause: no preference at all

Moving data bought weeks. It did not explain how a single film reached 68G.

Radarr’s stock quality definitions have maxSize: null for every 2160p class. No limit means a Remux-2160p is an acceptable release. One of them was 21% of the entire library.

The resolution was not the problem. The bitrate was. Two constraints decide what is worth storing here:

• remote streaming is capped at 12 Mbps, so anything above about 5.4 GB per hour cannot be delivered off the LAN at all;
• a 2160p WEB-DL measures 125-310 MB/min, and a 2160p remux measures 450-750.

So 4K is fine as WEB-DL. The remux class has no consumer in this house.

Layer one: recyclarr owns quality profiles

Profiles decide which qualities may be downloaded. recyclarr reconciles them from a file in the GitOps repo, nightly.

Three profiles, all upgrade-enabled:

No profile allows Remux or Bluray-2160p. 4K stays possible, but only in its sane form and only when assigned to a specific movie.

AVI is not a target. It is a 1992 container, usually with Xvid video: no modern subtitles, no reliable seeking index, and Jellyfin cannot direct-play it, so every playback transcodes for nothing. The library is already 100% MKV and it should stay that way. 1080p HEVC in MKV is the default; H.264 only when a client forces it.

Three things went wrong on the way:

1. --dry-run does not exist in the pinned image. The nightly job failed on every schedule until the log said Unknown option 'dry-run' and it became --preview.
2. The config I wrote was version 8 shaped. recyclarr config create pulls templates from the templates repository’s master branch, which is already v8, while the image is 7.4.0. It answered Property 'trash_id' not found.
3. TRaSH presets are not a shortcut for size limits. Their quality_definition now sets Max = 1000 (Unlimited) for every quality. Applying it would have removed the useful 1080p cap and kept 2160p unlimited, which is the accident itself.

Layer two: OpenTofu owns the size caps

recyclarr cannot express numbers, so sizes do not belong to it. OpenTofu has providers for both apps, and quality_definition is a resource.

Caps in MB per minute:

Those numbers come from measurement, not from taste: a 60-minute 1080p episode is about 30 MB/min, the 34G 2160p WEB-DL replacement is about 309, and the 68G remux is about 620.

My first draft said 20/55 MB/min. That was wrong. 55 would have rejected every real 4K WEB-DL, so the cap would have looked strict while quietly breaking 4K. The mistake is in the runbook now, with a note not to repeat it.

The rest of that layer is small but earns its place: root folders imported (not created, that would duplicate them) and a Telegram notification per app, failure signals only. Health issues, restores, app updates and manual interaction. Grab and import events stay off, because a TV library would otherwise send a message per episode.

What the ownership split looks like

One object, one owner. This matters because two reconcilers touching the same object produce a loop: recyclarr would write a profile, Tofu would see drift and revert it, and both would be right.

Download clients and Prowlarr indexers are still imperative, in the setup script. Moving them needs a full config translation per object and duplicates are dangerous there, so they stay for a later slice.

What it bought

• the 68G remux class cannot return through any profile;
• 2160p has a size limit for the first time;
• all three branches sit between 38% and 46%, with 122G free on the busiest one;
• a chapter of configuration that lived only in a SQLite file is now reviewable in a pull request.

What I would do differently: set the caps before the rebalance. Moving 157G by hand was a symptom. The preference was the disease.