Torrenting: An Idiot's Guide

[carln]

I haven't myself either but it's something I will have to look into. Bryn, how safe is it to leave your computer seeding all night. Is there any security issues? Any tiny possibility of some hacker being able to use the torrent program as a backdoor to examine files on my hard drive?

[Bryn]

I've never heard of it happening myself Carl and never experienced any problems personally. I guess it all depends on how secure your computer is in general really, if you've got a reputable antivirus and firewall, say AVG / Avast then i don't think you're in any trouble. The only real way torrenting can hurt your computer is in two ways;

1. Downloading malicious software that alters your system registry or otherwise FUBARs your system.
2. Constant hard drive read/write could be damaging in the long, long term.

[carln]

Thanks Bryn, was just wondering because I automatically distrust anything opening ports to computers, especially ones on a network.

One more question. Can I decide which files I want to seed. Say for example I download 2 files via torrent today. Can I be a seeder for File A tonight but not allow anyone access File B that I just downloaded via torrent?

[Bryn]

Yep exactly like that, you simply leave File A on uTorrent's list of things you're downloading and it will automatically seed, assuming you allow uploads of course.

To not share File B, download while leaving uploads off and delete from uTorrent list when finished downloading, it will stay in your download directory. But that would make you bad Carl BAD CARL. BAD.

I tend to seed things for a week or so, but for things like whole TV season's they take so long to download that you'll upload gigs and gigs of it while it's downloading.

[Combat Marmot]

My only experience with torrents and such is either through DLing linux distros (to try and then ultimately give up on) or getting demos and such from www.gameupdates.org

Until this morning I would have said that I'd never detected a virus in their files but my Race Driver Grid demo I DLed apparently contained a trojan (although I'm not totally sure that wasn't a false positive). Anyway, gameupdates have a fairly decent selection of movies, mods, demos etc for more recent things.

[cheesem0nster]

Nice guide Bryn!

Noticed you didn't have anything on multiple trackers, which speeds up the torrents. (Bittorrent DNA?)

I find torrentz.com is good fr searching, as it will give you a list of all the trackers for that torrent, which can be copy-pasted into the tracker list of the client

[jurassicjim]

Great guide Brun.

j

[Bryn]

Good idea Andy, will update when i get twenty minutes..

[Bryn]

Updated to include Torrentz.com, an 'Additional Trackers' section and done a bit of tidying.

On second reading the Trackers section might seem a bit daunting to torrenting noobs, ask away if you've got questions.

[raith_rovers_fan]

Does any one know where utorrent keeps its .torrent files, i got my new hard drive and need to copy them across from the old one so i can continue seeding on my private tracker but i cant find them.
PS this topic should be stickied i think

[FatIan]

you should find them here-

C:\Users\your user name\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent

[Fodder]

Nice guide Bryn. I always try and find a torrent for opensource stuff if possible, notmally better than the server based download.

[raith_rovers_fan]

Thanks Ian, I reloaded all my torrents but by not allowing itunes to copy the files to its own directory when i altered any info on the tracks it altered the id3 tags on the torrent, this means that it wanted to redownload about 33% of my torrents. bummer.

[DaveG]

A couple of points:
Transmission is the default torrent application installed on Ubuntu.

It has been said that, while Torrents spread the bandwidth for content creatures who have restricted bandwidth, that is generally bad for the internet because of the sheer number of open connections that each client makes. So, very ironically, the best thing for the internet as a machine, is to leech.

[Replicant]

Do you use Transmission then Dave?

I have always decided against the default and installed utorrent instead.