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Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 It's funny to be part of that history. As the article say
by cesarb 5y ago
Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253
It's funny to be part of that history. As the article says, "for a file to live on, at least one person has to keep sharing it", and for a while, I was that person (see the comments on that HN post).
- jghn 5y agoAbout 10-15 years ago I went to download a torrent. It never had many seeders and got stuck at 94.8%. It was there for a few years. One day one of the very few, if not the only, humans with the whole torrent must have connected as it was 100%. Serendipity. And then about 5 years later I lost the files in a hard drive crash. Tried to grab the torrent again and all this time later it is sitting at, you guessed it, 94.8%.
- arthurcolle 5y agoWhat's the torrent?
- jghn 5y agoA (mostly bootleg) video bundle from a not super popular band. I'm pretty sure everything in there is easily accessible via Youtube now but it's the principle of the thing
- arthurcolle 5y agoyeah for sure, I was just curious - cheers
- leokennis 5y agoI once loooong ago tried downloading a rare music album but it was stuck at 99.8% with 0 seeders and 2 peers (including me) for months so I was pretty bummed. But I neglected to actually check the download folder. When I did, I found out it actually downloaded all the important files, just the logo of the upload group was still a .part file… So I quickly downloaded another more popular release by the same group, copied over the logo and lo and behold, now it got to 100%! That day I actually felt like a hacker…
- FalconSensei 5y agoThat's nice! When it happens with me, it's like a torrent with 1 large file + the unnecessary files (txt, nfo from the upload group), and the missing .1% is on the file I want :/ But then, occasionally 1 or 2 gets completed, and then I'm happy
- stjohnswarts 5y agoThis is why such things should be in archives but individual files, as least people can get a significant portion of the files from the torrent.
- rozab 5y agoMy torrent client (deluge) gives the option to check which files in the torrent I want to download when I add it. So bittorrent already has this facility, and it's probably how this situation arose in the first place.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI was talking about zipping all the files into one big zip/xz/whatever, torrents don't allow those to be broken up into "little files". All bittorrent clients I've used have the ability to select which files (-not- in an archive) you want to download, but default to "all"
- rasz 5y agoI got a free Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy CD set in 2003 because second disk had a deep scratch making less than megabyte of a 700MB data file unreadable. Found a torrent that wasnt a repack and it synced perfectly at 90 something % :-)
- bserge 5y agoSomeone somewhere has the exact same problem and they're hoping a peer with the rest of the torrent will connect. That or a seed box :D
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 5y agoI've had that happen more than a couple of times at this point (often on Chinese or Japanese torrents), and I find it very strange. I always assume that some long replaced-but-not-thrown-away computer was turned on to find some old file, and it immediately and automatically resumed its mission to send bits of a 90s soap opera intercontinentally. Then after the owner finds what they need, the computer goes off and into the closet again, as I send those bits back to China, to the other 5 people who are silly enough to leave these things open for years.
- oversharer 5y agoI've kept sharing thousands, maybe tens of thousands of torrents over the years, keeping them even across Windows reinstalls. Btw it makes uTorrent start in about a minute. Point being, not all of these torrents can be shared at the same time, so uTorrent uses some algorithm to cycle over the seeded files in small groups over time. Maybe that's what's happening in this scenario. Some trackers also have re-seed requests which means that the tracker knows which users downloaded the torrent in the past and when it's no longer seeded and someone requests a reupload, those uses get that request into their inbox, so there's a chance that some of them have kept the files and can thus re-seed the torrent.
- SSLy 5y agoIt's strange that your other peers didn't pick up the missing pieces.