Need to start clean but not lose downloaded files.

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rdalek
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Joined: Thu Jun 01, 2023 4:49 am

Need to start clean but not lose downloaded files.

Post by rdalek »

Howdy,

New member so hi to everyone. Up to this point, qbittorrent, QB, just worked but a couple days ago, I think I made a boo boo. I don't think this is a bug or anything. Gonna kinda start from the beginning.

I started using QB a good while back. Let's not get into to the details of what I download. ;) Over that time, I've obtained a lot of files that are kinda hard to get. I hold onto those files to give back since I have quite a chunk of disk space. The other day, I started selecting the torrents in blocks and adding additional trackers manually. Some only had a small number and were not very active, receiving or sending. When I started adding these trackers, it improved both directions. The problem started when I was adding trackers to the ones that were only seeding.

When I add trackers, it takes it a bit to merge them with trackers it already has. That's why I do it in chunks. Usually 30 or so at a time. It was working fine until it took one CPU core to max usage and just hangs there. After hours of this, much longer than previous times, I stopped QB and restarted it. It comes up with the pop up that it is loading torrents and that part works normally. Once it is done, one CPU core to max again and nothing. No network activity at all. I have let it sit there with one core at max for hours, sometimes all day or all night and it never finishes whatever it is doing.

I don't want to lose the actual files I've downloaded but I'd like to reset the rest. Basically, I want to start fresh, readd the torrents and QB find the downloaded files, whole or in part, already there. My plan is to do a ls for the names of the torrents, hash would be nice to if I can figure them out, and use those to add them back.

Is this doable? What all must I delete? I'm a Gentoo Linux user here.

Also, for future ease, I'd like the .torrent files to be stored in one directory and the files themselves to another. If I'm about to get a fresh start, this is a good time to reorganize a bit.

I hope I'm clear on this but since QB has just worked for me until now, I'm not real sure what terms to use for things. The .torrent file is what I get to start the torrent being added to QB. The file itself is the things it downloads based on the .torrent file. That make sense??

Thanks for any help.
rdalek
Newbie
Newbie
Posts: 17
Joined: Thu Jun 01, 2023 4:49 am

Re: Need to start clean but not lose downloaded files.

Post by rdalek »

I managed to save a list of everything just in case I lost it. I wanted to rearrange things so first, I did my moving around. I then put the downloaded files in its own directory. So, I first moved those there since that is the biggie. I then renamed the other directories with .old on the end. When I started QB, it was empty as expected. I then changed the directory settings so it would know where they were moved too. I also changed where it needs to look for the .torrent files and such too. I then added my first torrent back using the hash code and a torrent site that searches by the hash code. When I added it back, it saw the file was already there and after it checked to make sure it was good, it was like it was never changed.

So, this is doable. The only bad thing, I got to add these back one at a time but to be honest, given I really messed it up, that's on me.

While I'm here, is there a way to know a tracker URL is good before adding it? A way to test it? I'd like to have as many working ones as I can because it not only helps me download, it helps to seed as well. Since I'm a Linux user, I like to return the favor. After all, I'm lucky to also have fiber internet.
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