I have several terabytes of movies and tv shows and want to seed these, but don’t have the torrents for this content.
Any way for me to seed this?
Most good clients should start seeding from an existing file if you find the original torrent on the web somewhere. Or even one that just has that same file in it.
This is it. If you know where you downloaded from and can match up the file names, just put the movie in the downloads folder (or point your torrent client at the folder containing the movie when adding the torrent). It’ll do a piece-by-piece check then start seeding.
How does this process work, and can it be abused?
Since the torrent file is small and doesn’t contain all the data in the file itself. Can you download a file, modify it maliciously, then seed that?
A modified file will not pass the original torrent file hash integrity heck, and trackers will not consider a torrent with a modified hash as “the same”. So the bittorrent protocol is actually quite resilient against an injection attack.
What you can do if you don’t know the file name is start the torrent and let it get to 1%, or enough to get the initial torrent data, pause the torrent, and you should have a partial file in the download folder.
Rename your file to match the new one in the download folder, and overwrite the new file with your existing one. Tell the torrent client to force a recheck, and it should identify your newly renamed file as the correct file from the torrent. Now you just restart the torrent, and you’re good to go :)
The only thing to watch out for is that some torrent programs rename partially downloaded files to stop you confusing them with completed files. It’s usually done by appending something to the end of the filename though, so it’s easy to spot.
If you have all the original, unedited files you downloaded (this might mean multi-part rar archives) can either point your BT client at the location or move/copy them to where your client expects them.
I tend to add the torrent making sure it doesn’t start, do a manual recheck to check it’s working as expected, then start the torrent.If you have main file(s) only e.g. .mkv but not the .nfo and there are other seeders you can do the same as above and it’ll re-download - so in my example the block that contains the .nfo along with some of the .mkv will be downloaded. I tend to copy the files over, just in case but I don’t think that’s actually ever been necessary for me.
Another option is to have the file you care about and have the SRR file to restore the files to the downloaded state - adding .nfo files but it can also put the files back into those annoying rar archives. This way you can be the only seeder without having too many extra files hanging around. These are quite rare though.
If you find the torrent files or the magnet links you used, and you add them to your torrent client again, it should be able to pick up your existing files and seed them (if you haven’t renamed or moved the files). Before you do that, make a backup of the files at least for the first few torrents, in case the client starts overwriting your existing files. In that case you may need to do something, like to start a “recheck” operation. If it hasn’t done that for the first few, it’s safe to assume it won’t either for the remaining.
I recommend you to use ed2k/kad networks. You just have to start the client (emule, aMule or mldonkey) and share the folders. The first time you will need a server.met file, which contains the servers, the ipfilter.dat and also nodes.dat for the kad network.
