Hi, let me know if this is obviously stupid and won’t work. I’m an old pirate but obviously still pretty uneducated. I’ve got a dead torrent that’s a collection of roms. 4 seeders, 800 abandoned peers (ungrateful basterds). Seeders are rarely online or can’t provide more than 8% after a week. The roms are pretty mainstream and it’s strange for this torrent to have been abandoned.
If I can find find the exact releases of as many roms as possible in the collection from other singular sources, can I resurrect this torrent by just copy+overwrite into the unfinished folder? is it that simple or is this hubris? am I too old to be this stupid?
this is why i have about 200 seeding torrents in my client because i just know that the second i stop someones gonna want it </3
This is a neat idea and it will totally work, but they need to be the EXACT same files down to the checksums and file names. This could be harder to pull off than it sounds but it’s absolutely possible.
it totally worked!
I tried this once and it did in fact work.
The files have to be exact copies of the originals so this usually isn’t possible. The only time I’ve ever had success with reviving torrents was by finding a DDL that miraculously hadn’t been deleted that was an archive of the original torrent. I found it by searching online for the exact name of the release.
so I got a copies from Vimm’s Lair to overwrite and bump up the progress on the torrent. but I just noticed the new files only show that they’re 99.3-99.7% after overwriting and rechecking the torrent. would this indicate that they’re the wrong hash afterall?
If you have a few dollars to spare you might try on real debrid. If someone has once downloaded it on their service, it may still be in their cache. I’ve resurrected quite a few vintage torrents with this technique.
If you checked the torrent file and it’s showing 99+% that means you almost certainly have the right file but some minute piece of metadata is off. Good news is now you only have to snag ~1% of that file from the seeders that pop in an out and you’ll be set.
that’s exactly what happened. this was so dope to watch happen
Maybe not only metadata. Could be baddumps, overdumps or alt roms.
With 99+% of hashes matching?
Whatever the issue, theres good odds that the pieces with matching hashes are perfectly fine and the <1% of pieces with errors OPs bittorrent client can and did replace, so now the files are identical to source and good to go!
With 99+% of hashes matching?
Yes.
I seed but never created a torrent file. I wonder if there is a command to create a new hash to see if you can compare the old one with the new one. That way you can see if it truly is the same file.
my client has an option to create a torrent file. I wouldn’t know how to compare the two though 🤔
Wouldn’t the other files you use as replacements have to be bit-perfect matches of the original files in the torrent? I would think grabbing random ROMs from various sources would not work like that.
Many ROMs are ripped by a small number of groups and pretty much copied and distributed everywhere.
There are a few websites that list all the ROMs and their hashes so you can check.
So chances are fairly big they actually match I’d assume?
Only difference might be that people tend to add “Downloaded from whatever” metadata or text files
that’s what I’m assuming. I know even GBA roms have different versions that got shipped to different countries. but some sites over multiple versions for you to download so I was planning on rechecking the torrent after every overwrite until I see the progress bar leap up for that file.
still seems to easy to actually work though, right?
edit:FUCK FUCK FUCK IT WORKED HOLY SHIT BOYS
I’m glad it worked. I was going to to rebut all the pessimists in here, saying I’ve done this before, and most ROM copies are identical. (Sites like Retro Achievements rely on ROMs having specific hashes, for example.)
You could probably try that but I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort with many other sources available for those ROMs. I personally would only put this kind of effort in for something rare and hard to find.
you’re not wrong. it probably isn’t worth the bother because these are all available elsewhere but I think I just got sentimental about how leeched the torrent is. it’s a good collection, and what if there’s like a kid somewhere who ends up discovering p2p through this? not likely but I think I like to dream
Feel free to send the torrent my way, I’d be happy to help keep it alive
you got it 👍
I’ve done it before on something else. It does need to be bit-perfect, but ROM’s are one of the easier things to find bit-perfect matches for.
deleted by creator
4 seeders
4 seeds means it’s not actually a dead torrent. Slow uploading sure, but not dead. I’d suggest just leaving it alone, if it’s going at 8% per week it should finish on its own in roughly 13 weeks assuming the speeds don’t change much. That’s going to be a while but once you’ve got it you’ll be seed number 5 as long as you keep seeding it on your end.
If I can find find the exact releases of as many roms as possible in the collection from other singular sources, can I resurrect this torrent by just copy+overwrite into the unfinished folder?
Sure that may work in theory. Just keep in mind you’d need to find tons of ROM files that are exact bit-by-bit matches of the files in the torrent - otherwise overwriting mismatched data into your currently downloading torrent would make things slower for you since you’d now have to re-download that data to get back to 8% or whatever.
EDIT: Looks like you lucked out, congrats seed #5 :)
TY! :D I DID luck out. the first version that worked came literally from Vimm’s Lair which doesn’t offer multiple releases but I do prefer to use over other places.
you’re right, but the 8% stopped after the first day. it was dead since then. do some people only seed certain things on a rotation schedule?
More likely those seeds are super-busy so it just takes a while to keep a consistent upload. these type of seeds tend to be on a ton of other low seed torrents. So any new seeds helps.
And of course there’s the seeds that just don’t have great connections e.g. could be a laptop that is literally only online x hours a day or even week, or they can only upload at night or whatever.
ohhhh, that makes sense. yeah now that I’ve added this new files suddenly more seeds have showed up. also the number of peers has decreased to 1 (48). it seems like ever since I started using Tribbler as my client that these numbers fluxuate more than can be realistic
Honest question: Is it silly to post the magnet so it can be resurrected?
you know, I honestly just assumed it’s not allowed because that’s what I was used to on reddit. the rules here seem much more relaxed but I feel like I should be semi-discreet so they stay that way
A magnet link is just a hash, in theory you can’t protect a number
The whole files don’t need to match, just parts
Good luck, quite easy to do! Remember to hit recheck after modifying the files if the client doesn’t pick it up
It is possible, I’ve done it myself. I had two dead torrents with 0 seeders that I really suspected were the exact same thing, so one day I changed the destination folders to point at the same place, it worked.
What I don’t think I did is to have both torrents active at the same time while downloading.
