4 ms·

Is remember back in the day 2008 you could download individual files from torrents (Amiga disk images). Is there a torrent toll that can compare individual file

by ptek 2y ago

Is remember back in the day 2008 you could download individual files from torrents (Amiga disk images). Is there a torrent toll that can compare individual files in a torrent and if the hashes are correct, download from a bunch and rebuild the torrent. Some torrents add another ASCII advert like Amiga BBS's used to add back in the old day which used to result in dupes?. Amazing that book piracy is a thing, I guess it's pretty big on this board as the majority of users on this board would be considered 'bookish' and know that a lot of the (technical) books that would like are not available at the local library.

pradn 2y ago
You can still download specific files from torrents of many files, yes. You can pick a subset of files to download. In theory, you could extend torrent clients to support archiving some subset of the files. You just tell it to keep around 100 GB of files in a 10 TB torrent. Since the client knows the status of each chunk in the swarm, it can make smart decisions about which chunks to download and seed. Clients already let to set preferences to seed the "least-seeded" chunks. So this isn't so far fetched. The big problem with this is that it lets you work only with a fixed archive. Torrent files can't be mutated after they are created. So you'd be able to get people to archive a fixed version of a shadow library, but not an evolving one. In practice, this should be fine enough. If we had high assurance that all the books added to the library before 2022 (or something) were copied in 50 machines, that's quite useful. Being able to layer deltas on top would be amazing - you could evolve the collection as new books are added.