How to add torrents with only the downloaded file? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 4 days ago by HumanPerson@sh.itjust.works to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I messed up. My server's boot drive failed and I have no backups and have been unsuccessful in recovering any data. It contained the docker container and data for qbittorrent, meaning all the torrent files for the torrents I was seeding are all gone. I still have the files themselves which are intact on a separate raid. The problem Is I don't know how to continue seeding them because I don't have the original torrent files or magnet links or anything. Does anyone know how I can search for torrents that match the files I have, or do I simply have to replace everything one by one in order to continue seeding? Thank you everyone in advance. Also, I should mention that I am currently working on putting together a backup server as soon as parts arrive in a few days.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 10 points 4 days ago

I'm pretty sure this will be a lot of work. Even assuming you didn't rename any files and all the torrents are in a single folder, you still need to re-search for every torrent file and add them to a torrent client that should automatically find the files in the target location and check them to see that it's already downloaded. I'm not sure if all torrent clients do this so I would advise testing it first - when re-adding a torrent with existing files I usually add it paused and then force re-check to be safe.

In theory it should be possible to make a program that does this - automatically indexes and crawls torrent sites and DHT, fetches torrent meta info, then scans your HD for matching files to seed. This feature is a proposed one for the DHT crawler "bit magnet" so I'm hopeful that one day there will be a program that can do that.