Skip to content

Deletion Management

Harry Elliott edited this page Apr 6, 2026 · 1 revision

Deletion Management

Nothing gets deleted immediately in Prunerr. Everything goes through the deletion queue first.

How it works

  1. A rule matches items (or you manually queue something)
  2. Those items go into the deletion queue with a grace period countdown
  3. You can review the queue at any time and cancel anything you don't want deleted
  4. When the grace period expires, the scheduled task processes the queue and deletes items through Sonarr/Radarr

Deletion Actions

When queuing items, you pick how they should be removed:

Action What happens
Unmonitor Only Tells Sonarr/Radarr to stop looking for this. Files stay on disk.
Delete Files Only Removes the actual media files but keeps the entry in Sonarr/Radarr so it can be re-downloaded later.
Unmonitor & Delete Removes files AND stops monitoring. This is what most people use.
Full Removal Nukes everything — removes the entry entirely from Sonarr/Radarr. Gone.

Grace Periods

Every deletion has a grace period in days. The default is 7 days but you can set it per-rule or per-item. During the grace period:

  • The item shows as "Queued for Deletion" in the Library
  • It appears in the Queue with a countdown
  • You can cancel it at any time

Set it to 0 if you want immediate processing (the next scheduled run will delete it).

Overseerr/Seerr Reset

If someone requested a show through Overseerr and you delete it, you can optionally reset the request. This lets them re-request it if they actually wanted it — maybe they just hadn't gotten around to watching it yet.

Enable this per-rule or per-item when queuing.

Protection

Protected items can never be queued for deletion. Protection can come from:

  • Individual protection — right-click an item in the Library and protect it
  • Collection protection — protect a whole Radarr collection
  • Bulk protection — select multiple items and protect them all at once

Protection always wins. If an item is protected and a rule matches it, the item gets skipped and shows up in the "skipped (protected)" count.

Scheduled Processing

The deletion queue is processed automatically on a schedule (default: daily at 4 AM). Only items whose grace period has expired get processed. You can also trigger processing manually from the Queue page.

Activity Log

Every action is logged — when something was queued, by which rule, when it was deleted, when protection was added or removed, etc. Check the Activity page for the full history, or look at individual items' activity timelines on their detail pages.

Clone this wiki locally