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Migrate Real-Debrid to Usenet (via NzbDAV)

Updated

Legal Responsibility

This guide covers the technical mechanics of migrating between cloud storage services. Users are solely responsible for ensuring all content accessed, stored, or streamed through this setup is legally obtained and complies with applicable copyright laws and the terms of service of Real-Debrid, your Usenet provider, and other third-party services. ElfHosted provides hosting infrastructure only and does not provide, curate, or facilitate access to copyrighted content. See our Acceptable Use Policy for details.

This is the four-step path from a Real-Debrid + Decypharr (or Zurg) setup to Usenet + NzbDAV on ElfHosted. Step 1 swaps your subscription so the new Usenet-backed stack rolls in with NzbDAV preinstalled, the remaining steps let the arrs rebuild the library through the indexers you configure.

If you haven't read the migration overview yet, start there for the why: Real-Debrid's single-IP concurrency limit and service reliability. This page is the how.

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Why Usenet (and why NzbDAV)

Usenet has a few structural advantages as a media-stack backend:

  • No single-IP rule. Usenet bills per byte / per month from your provider, not per concurrent stream from an account. Your household, your VPN, your arr stack, and your phone over cellular can all hit it at once.
  • Long retention. Most major providers keep articles for years, so older releases stay retrievable.
  • Predictable billing. You pay your provider for a plan, with no cache-retention timers or library limits to manage.

Usenet on ElfHosted runs through NzbDAV, a SABnzbd-API-compatible downloader that surfaces Usenet content as a virtual filesystem with no upfront download. When the arrs grab a release, NzbDAV creates a virtual file at /storage/nzbdav/... and a symlink in your library; when the media server reads the file at playback, NzbDAV pulls the articles from your Usenet provider on demand. There's no caching layer to manage and no cache-retention timer to keep alive.

Unlike the TorBox path, there's no equivalent of importing a Real-Debrid hashlist: Usenet has no global cache to check your old hashes against. The Real-Debrid library's value as a hashlist is, for this migration, mostly historical; what you really want is for the arrs to search your Newznab indexers again for the items in your library.

Migration steps

Full setup guide

The step-by-step setup is available to logged-in customers. Sign in to continue β†’

How do I get help?

  1. For general use of the individual tools, refer to each app's upstream site
  2. For specific support re your ElfHosted configuration, see the ElfHosted support options

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