The Backlog Nudge feature searches for missing content — movies and episodes that are monitored in your library but have never been successfully grabbed.

Cutoff Unmet sweeps target items you have but want better. Backlog Nudges target items you don't have yet at all.

When Backlog is enabled for Radarr, Nudgarr calls the missing movies endpoint on each enabled Radarr instance, filters the results, and triggers searches for up to the configured maximum. The same applies independently for Sonarr.

Backlog and Cutoff Unmet are separate. They run within the same sweep but use different caps and record different history entries (labelled Backlog vs Cutoff in the History tab).

Backlog is off by default. To enable it:

1. Open Settings
2. Toggle Radarr Backlog and/or Sonarr Backlog to on
3. Adjust Missing Max and Missing Added Days as needed
4. Save

The maximum number of missing items to search per sweep, per app. This is a separate cap from Max Movies/Episodes per Run, which applies only to Cutoff Unmet.

Setting Missing Max to 0 effectively disables backlog searches even when the toggle is on.

Nudgarr only considers items that were added to your library at least this many days ago. This filter exists to give your normal RSS grabber a reasonable window to find new releases before Nudgarr steps in.

Example: With the default of 14, a movie added to Radarr yesterday will not be included in backlog searches. A movie added 15 days ago will be eligible.

Setting this to 0 disables the age filter — all missing items are eligible regardless of when they were added.

After fetching missing items and applying the age filter and exclusions list, Nudgarr applies the same cooldown check and sample mode as Cutoff Unmet searches. Items already present in the download queue are silently skipped and do not consume a Backlog slot.

The Sample Mode setting (Random, Alphabetical, Oldest Added, Newest Added) applies to both Cutoff Unmet and Backlog picks independently. Both use the same configured mode.

In the History tab, Backlog searches appear with the label Backlog. Cutoff Unmet searches appear as Cutoff. You can use the type column to distinguish between them when reviewing what Nudgarr has searched.

• Start with the defaults (Missing Max: 1, Missing Added Days: 14) and see how your indexers respond before increasing the cap.
• If you have a large backlog and want Nudgarr to work through it steadily, increasing Missing Max to 3–5 with Random sample mode spreads searches across different titles over time.
• If you prefer to work through backlog in a specific order, use Oldest Added to prioritise the longest-waiting items, or Newest Added to keep recent additions top of mind.
• The cooldown applies to backlog items the same as to Cutoff Unmet — if a missing movie was just searched, it won't be searched again until the cooldown window expires.