4 ms·

I think this is mostly a consequence of how the clients work. When I download something with BitTorrent, it goes into a Downloads folder. Then I want to move an

I think this is mostly a consequence of how the clients work. When I download something with BitTorrent, it goes into a Downloads folder. Then I want to move and rename the files to fit into an organized collection, but then the client won't be able to find it anymore. If my client were able to track files across moves and renames, I'd be much more willing to seed things permanently. (It would also need to have good upstream-bandwidth management, use a number of TCP connections that's less than O(n) in the number of torrents, and offer a few bulk operations like "stop seeding torrents with more than N seeds" and "resume seeding torrents with fewer than N seeds".)

LukeShu 11y ago
I've "solved" this by having torrents go to a "Torrents" folder, then symlinking those files into my organized collection.
- doomrobo 11y ago
  I do the same thing but into multiple folders with a unionfs in read-only mode so I don't accidentally modify the files and cause them to be re-downloaded
- icebraining 11y ago
  I hardlink them instead. Then I can prune them from the torrents folder without affecting the organized file.
  - LukeShu 11y ago
    Even if I stop seeding, I like to keep them in the torrents folder because it gives me essentially free integrity checking.
harryh 11y ago
You can deal with the renaming issue with a bunch of symlinks. It's pretty easy to script that up.
petra 11y ago
To make it work i think the client should have some hard drive space allocated for the purpose of "preservation" , which he can automatically use according to some reasonable policy(maybe only files i downloaded can be put in the folder) and it should allocate some share of my bandwidth for that purpose. Than the client automatically manages everything with coordination from the network. That's the only way this can scale for regular users, i think. And of course it may use social mechanisms like feedback "you're the reason why this rare work of art if available for everyone". As for scalability of TCP connections , you're probably right, not my area of expertise , but once this will be declared as an important BT problem with great practical value, i'm sure some researchers would be happy to contribute and might solve this.
- niftich 11y ago
  There are distributed data stores that work just like this. IPFS (https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/) is a recent effort, while Freenet (https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/) has been around for a while. Whether this can be retrofitted into Bittorrent not clear. Conceivably one could write a bridge between IPFS and Bittorrent such that an IPFS url could serve as an "IPFS seed" much like a HTTP url can serve as a BEP 19 webseed.
  - petra 11y ago
    It could work, but wouldn't it be simpler , as a first step, to add this feature in a basic form to a python based BT client like tribler and see where it goes from there ? I.e. 1. At torrent delete , set a flag on torrent to hide 2. At torrent display , don't display hidden torrents 3. Periodically or on storage_full event - fully delete hidden torrents , based on some simple strategy like "remove those with most seeds" ? And after building it and testing a bit , creating some nice web page , a bit of marketing , and gather developers/users ? Who knows, might become popular . Might have tried to do so myself , but i'm not really a developer. Anyway, is it realistic?
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    You'd want to write a server that could retrieve and serve the file over bittorrent, but would store it canonically in IPFS.

LukeShu 11y ago

I've "solved" this by having torrents go to a "Torrents" folder, then symlinking those files into my organized collection.

doomrobo 11y ago
I do the same thing but into multiple folders with a unionfs in read-only mode so I don't accidentally modify the files and cause them to be re-downloaded
icebraining 11y ago
I hardlink them instead. Then I can prune them from the torrents folder without affecting the organized file.
- LukeShu 11y ago
  Even if I stop seeding, I like to keep them in the torrents folder because it gives me essentially free integrity checking.

harryh 11y ago

You can deal with the renaming issue with a bunch of symlinks. It's pretty easy to script that up.

petra 11y ago

To make it work i think the client should have some hard drive space allocated for the purpose of "preservation" , which he can automatically use according to some reasonable policy(maybe only files i downloaded can be put in the folder) and it should allocate some share of my bandwidth for that purpose. Than the client automatically manages everything with coordination from the network. That's the only way this can scale for regular users, i think. And of course it may use social mechanisms like feedback "you're the reason why this rare work of art if available for everyone". As for scalability of TCP connections , you're probably right, not my area of expertise , but once this will be declared as an important BT problem with great practical value, i'm sure some researchers would be happy to contribute and might solve this.

niftich 11y ago
There are distributed data stores that work just like this. IPFS (https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/) is a recent effort, while Freenet (https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/) has been around for a while. Whether this can be retrofitted into Bittorrent not clear. Conceivably one could write a bridge between IPFS and Bittorrent such that an IPFS url could serve as an "IPFS seed" much like a HTTP url can serve as a BEP 19 webseed.
- petra 11y ago
  It could work, but wouldn't it be simpler , as a first step, to add this feature in a basic form to a python based BT client like tribler and see where it goes from there ? I.e. 1. At torrent delete , set a flag on torrent to hide 2. At torrent display , don't display hidden torrents 3. Periodically or on storage_full event - fully delete hidden torrents , based on some simple strategy like "remove those with most seeds" ? And after building it and testing a bit , creating some nice web page , a bit of marketing , and gather developers/users ? Who knows, might become popular . Might have tried to do so myself , but i'm not really a developer. Anyway, is it realistic?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  You'd want to write a server that could retrieve and serve the file over bittorrent, but would store it canonically in IPFS.