3 ms·

Do people ever make a torrent of their open data and link to it?

• ChrisLomont 5y ago
  Not for these size datasets. Torrents are just too small and unreliable, except for the very most popular items. Slightly out of mainstream movies, which are small and likely more popular than data for an obscure science experiment, are nearly impossible to find seeders for. So I'd guess no seeders want to host tens to thousands of terabyte torrents, and then thousands to millions of those for all the different datasets grabbed by all the science projects all over the world. The odds of being able to download one of these on demand is just about zero.
• jpeloquin 5y ago
  In my experience this is very rare, but that's my plan going forward. I can't guarantee that seed will stay up if I'm not paying attention to it though, so in practice it still means emailing the corresponding author. And actual transfer may still require sending hard drives through the mail. But publishing a torrent at least indicates willingness and preparation to share data, which is worth something.